Dior’s ties to La Serenissima run deep. Back in Christian Dior’s heyday, the couturier and Salvador Dali devised extravagant costumes for a legendary ball thrown by Charles de Bestegui at his palace, Palazzo Labia. “The most marvelous spectacle I have ever seen, or hope to see,” Dior wrote in his memoir. “Parties like this are genuine works of art.”
Today, the maison’s relationship with Venice is as interlaced as the city’s canals. Earlier this month, the official opening of the Biennale coincided with the Casino Royale Ball at the Palazzo del Casinò, a Dior-supported fundraiser for the restoration of the Ca’ d’Oro palace, a jewel of Venetian Gothic architecture.
And on Tuesday evening, the Casinò was back in play for Diorissima, a high jewelry homage to Venice—and art—courtesy of Victoire de Castellane. Upstairs in the monumental Art Deco building, a retro-glamorous lounge with a torch singer set the tone while, in the dining hall, lavish tablescapes by Cordelia de Castellane, artistic director of Dior Maison, underscored the concept with towering arrangements sprinkled with Murano glass daffodils, plus gilded porcelain and linens emblazoned with playing card suits. Guests from all over the world, many wearing Dior head-to-toe, took turns taking selfies as the sun set over the Adriatic.
But it was only after a gala dinner orchestrated by Michelin-starred chef Mauro Colagreco that the artistic director of Dior Joaillerie played her hand. Ribboned through a custom-built gaming hall with fully manned poker, blackjack, roulette, and craps tables, the runway offered up an exuberant display of color and unexpected pairings. Some 112 jewels were framed by 20 couture looks created by Jonathan Anderson for the occasion: short, sculptural bustier dresses made of reams of gathered silk panné velvet were accessorized with jewels such as a gradient pink wisteria necklace set with a splay of 4,100 diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and spinels. A graceful evening gown in ecru silk crepe played foil to a sunburst fringe necklace called Voie Lactée, featuring more than 3,000 diamonds radiating from a 7.03-carat cushion-cut solitaire.
Castellane’s whimsical flora, fauna, suns, moons, and stars were out in force, but some pieces struck a particularly personal note. In her spare time, when she’s not busy modeling designs by hand in her studio on the Avenue Montaigne, Castellane is an artist in her own right. Here, she brought that facet of her creative life into the mix by treating classic gems and cuts—for example a nearly six-carat pink oval sapphire from Madagascar, or a more than 10-carat royal blue sapphire from Myanmar—in a painterly fashion, contrasting them with mother-of-pearl and other ornamental stones. Lacquer, a now-signature flex, let her dial up her color palette to astonishing effect.
Picking up on the doublet technique used in last year’s Diorexquis collection, Castellane doubled down on collage-like effects, working thin layers of chrysoprase, aventurine, turquoise, chalcedony, and opal into clover-like leaves topped with 178 pear-cut diamonds for the Diorissima Lucky Flowers necklace. Elsewhere, a coral reef motif set with diamonds was outlined with ultrafine squiggles of white gold lacquered in tropical blues. Part homage to the artists Monsieur Dior admired, among them Matisse, Man Ray, and Picasso, it also read like an extension of Castellane’s artistic style.
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