The Jewelry Designer Creating Wearable Worlds - Vanity Fair
Victoire de Castellane doesn’t play favorites. Of the countless pieces she has designed as the creative director of Dior Fine Jewelry for more than 20 years, there isn’t a ring, earring, or necklace that she prefers over another. “I would love to have one of each color for each day of the week,” she says of the designs, many of which she wears in rotation, in a dazzling display of the art she’s been creating since she first arrived at Dior, in Paris, over two decades ago. “To me, making jewelry is a language,” she says. “It’s my way of expressing myself in the world.” Her vocabulary is one of playful imagination and vivid opulence, her designs an amalgam of organic textures reminiscent of sugar crystals, coral reefs, shards of rime. Each piece is de Castellane’s interpretation of the world around her, which has changed radically since the beginning of her career at Chanel in 1984. “When I arrived,” she says, “all of the jewelry houses were not how I imagined.” The lack of women jewelry designers in 1980s Paris perplexed and motivated de Castellane. She had grown up studying the work of great early- to mid-century designers, such as Suzanne Belperron and Jeanne Toussaint, women who “created jewelry for women,” she explains. “I don’t know what happened in the ’60s and ’70s, but after that it was really a man’s world. And it was boring.”
Now beloved for her anything-but-boring creations, the French designer describes her process in almost primitive terms: Visions of future pieces “flash” in her head; details must be “caught;” she’s on a constant quest for “good stones.” She enjoys working as if she were “five years old, playing, but in a very conscientious way.” This effervescence is on full display in her latest and largest collection, Gem Dior (a phonetic riff on “J’aime Dior”): 99 pieces forged from a veritable treasure chest of emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, rubies, and semiprecious stones, including tanzanites and Paraíba tourmalines. In June, the collection was unveiled at a sumptuous presentation in Venice; within a day, many of the one-of-a-kind rings, earrings, necklaces, and watches had been sold or reserved, at prices reaching into the millions.
But the personal value of her collection is, she says, truly sentimental: “My father is my inspiration. It’s crazy, but I just realized this. He’s a real ’70s man, wearing rings and pennants on metal chains, and he has this Latin exuberance. He wears jewelry in this really free way, and I put this in the jewelry without knowing it consciously.” Part paternal panache, part elegant exuberance, the new collection is emblematic of de Castellane’s contributions to the rarified world of high jewelry: modern in design, timeless in appeal.
