Victoire de Castellane, creative director of Dior Joaillerie, likes having fun. For 27 years, her creations have involved bold colours and unpopular stones, such as opals, with cameos from carnivorous plants or piratical skulls. Her knack is to make hit collections that imbue the heritage-bound realm of high jewellery with an aura of storybook fantasy. “Jewellery should be interesting, creative, free,” she says. “When I started working here, the fine-jewellery world was very classic. There was no risk! I told myself, ‘It doesn’t have to be boring.’”
De Castellane, 63, has meticulously straight blonde hair with a blunt fringe that, in tandem with emphatic eyeliner, speaks to a vision of Paris encapsulated in Technicolor movies – something hallucinogenic by Varda or Godard, perhaps. Her sunny office is similarly evocative, on the top floor of one of Dior’s buildings in Paris’s eighth arrondissement, between the Grand Palais and the Arc de Triomphe.
Victoire de Castellane with her cat Mouk © Jeremy Everett
Though her outfit – a black top, an elaborate textured green skirt and bulky trainers – speaks more to our present fashion moment, her necklace, a jewelled likeness of a panther flanked by pearls, could be the key plot device in a detective story. It’s a vintage piece, she explains, that she modified herself. Much of her personal collection was inherited from her grandmother, Silvia Rodríguez de Rivas, who was the Countess of Castilleja de Guzman, a small city in Seville, and married the cognac magnate Kilian Hennessy (just one of many interesting entries in de Castellane’s family tree alongside her great-great-uncle, Boni de Castellane, a man described as “the greatest dandy of the belle époque era”).
