10 years after the Bal des Roses collection, Victoire de Castellane, creative director of Dior fine jewellery has brought the brand’s beloved flower back into the spotlight with Dior Rose. The 116-piece high jewellery collection – the brand’s largest to date – made its debut on 7 June this year at the Dior runway show in Chengdu, China, adorning the ears, necklines and wrists of 24 models, dressed in gowns that were designed by Dior’s fashion creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, especially for this event.
The Dior Rose high jewellery release falls inline with the timely reopening of the brand’s historic home at 30 Avenue Montaigne, where Dior opened its first ever store in 1947. The now iconic address has been renovated to feature an exhibition space as well as a rooftop garden. This nature escape in the heart of Paris’s 8th arrondissement perfectly honours Monsieur Dior’s love of flowers, especially roses, by creating a “Dior Planet” full of colourful blooms that the designer would have loved to explore and tended to himself.
A creative and quiet child, Christian Dior could often be found throughout his youth in the garden of his childhood home in Normandy, admiring what was in his opinion, one of nature’s greatest works of art: flowers. This passion for nature drove and inspired most of his creative designs and decisions throughout his time at the helm of his brand. The creator’s life ended much as it started, spending his days in the garden of his estate in the south of France, Château de la Col Noir, a 19th century castle which Monsieur Dior redesigned from the inside out. The highlight of this beautiful property was and remains the garden he planted himself, full of his favourite flowers, and of course highlighting his roses.
With a fondness for roses, this collection celebrates Dior’s emblematic flower, comprising four chapters that reinterpret and reimagine the shape and colour of this famous bloom in four different ways: the romantic rose, the stained-glass rose, the futuristic rose and the abstract couture rose.
The romantic rose honours the flower in its truest form. Myanmar sapphires, Colombian emeralds and Mozambique rubies are set in a swirl of lifelike petals and leaves accompanied by a light sprinkling of dewy diamonds. The stained-glass rose mimics its namesake window frame with a series of monochromatic and rose-cut stones set around a central gem from which the smaller pavé-set stones seem to stem from. The futuristic rose features lacquered claws and a rose gold setting, as well as opals set in the centre of a more flat and fragmented interpretation of petals. Slightly off-centered golden South Sea pearls act as the radiant pistils for the stylized flower. Finally, the abstract couture rose plays with different setting heights, gemcuts and surreal shapes that evoke the feeling of picking a rose from another planet. A kite-cut diamond adds to the geometric oddity of this branch of the collection.
Timeless, classic and emotive, the Dior Rose high jewellery collection has elevated the rose symbol in a way that respects its past, whilst adding updated design elements, which will shape it’s relevance for modern-day consumers and ensure it’s presence for many years to come.
