In the early days of setting up on 30 Avenue Montaigne, the couturier Christian Dior opened a smaller boutique on the ground floor named Colifichets. While his haute couture salons were run upstairs, Colifichets offered a wider range of perfumes, simpler dresses, gloves, scarves and the like. It’s here that one of the house’s signatures was born: the walls of Colifichets were decorated with toile de jouy—fabrics bearing idyllic pastoral scenes.
While toile de jouy has been revived as a modern staple in the fashion collections of Dior, this year is the first time that Victoire de Castellane, the house’s artistic director of jewellery, is incorporating it into high jewellery in the Diorama & Diorigami collection.
Diorama, both literally and as a bit of branded wordplay, interprets the bucolic designs of toile de jouy prints in breathtakingly vivid three-dimensional form. The nature scenes are realised through a vibrant mix of coloured gemstones, textured and engraved gold that enhances the naturalistic impression, and—most interestingly— through the ancient art of glyptic stone carving.
See, for instance, a lush scene of nature rendered in handworked yellow gold. Diamonds, tsavorite garnets, yellow sapphires and cultured pearls make up a fantasy foliage anchored by a large emerald. Deer, a squirrel, a rabbit and a swan carved from milky green chrysoprase populate the scene, the animals grazing and resting with enchanting life.
The September ‘Kitsch’ issue of Vogue Singapore is available online or at newsstands.
