Dior’s grand tour of high jewelry presentations in Italy culminated this week with a sweep through Florence, where the house opened the doors, as if by magic, to cultural lodestars and hard-to-access venues, starting with the Basilica Santa Maria Novella. On Monday night, that Renaissance gem—whose chapels house treasures by Giotto, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Lippi, Michelangelo, and many others—became the backdrop for a candlelit seated dinner for 230 guests, featuring rosettes of prawn and a whorl of artichoke and black truffle feuilleté by the Michelin three-star chef Mauro Colagreco, served on lavish Italianate tablescapes by Dior Maison. The evening was capped off by a jewels-and-couture show for Diorama, Victoire de Castellane’s latest high jewelry collection, in the cloister.
De Castellane began her stellar 25-year tenure as Creative Director of Dior Joaillerie by shaking up the staid ways of Place Vendôme, rebooting the landscape with cheeky, colorful, scaled-up or scaled-down pieces that transformed how we think about buying and wearing jewelry to this day. “It’s like salt and pepper: it’s about seasoning things,” the designer offered. “Just because the stones are real doesn’t mean jewelry has to be boring and bourgeois.”
With Diorama, the designer reconnects with whimsy and playfulness by patinating an aristocratic 18th century fabric — the one Monsieur Christian Dior chose for the walls of his first boutique at 30 Avenue Montaigne—with gemstones, revisiting bucolic scenes with painstaking relief and a nod to women’s collections by Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri. A smattering of couture looks made for this presentation also reprised the house signature.