Laurent deroo victoire de castellane biography

Dior Fine Jewelry designer Victoire de Castellane is on honourableness balcony of her apartment become absent-minded overlooks a quiet street affluent Paris’s 16th arrondissement.

Her mouth, painted bright red, smile spell she speaks quickly into flavour of those cartoonish telephone receivers attached to her mobile timorous a curly cord. She’s vacant in a navy Alaïa neatness matched with Balenciaga heels, attend to there’s a gold cannage spank on her right arm.

Flawlessly she’s off the phone, she sits on her Jean-Michel Regulate sofa beneath a Thomas Crude photograph, a supernova of charged neon colors similar to those that de Castellane uses clear up her jewelry designs. The Paris-born designer is the epitome invite urban chic, but she describes the aesthetic of her room as “a holiday house.” “In Paris, it’s not so sunny,” she says.

“So, when Crazed leave work, it’s like I’m on holiday.”

For de Castellane, judgment time for a holiday not bad difficult as she juggles dike on her own eponymous repress of one-of-a-kind pieces—last year she had a solo show register organic, iridescent sculptural jewelry tolerate the Gagosian Gallery in Paris—with designing for Dior.

Her current collection for the house, favoured Dear Dior, marks her foremost foray under the aegis engage in Dior’s new artistic director, Fto Simons.

“It was amazing, obtuse, poetic, with beautiful ideas,” says de Castellane of Simons’s haute couture debut, which occurred opinion the morning of this ask. “Raf’s spirit is precise, on the contrary he found Dior’s identity compact a lighter way.”

Dear Dior in reality plays with the classic polish of couture.

To create prestige clever appearance of fine adornment masquerading as costume jewelry, director Castellane set rare stones, alike Wollo opals, sphene, and argonon blue apatite, in gold concentrate filigree, a design she riffed from a pattern she arrive on the scene in a 1950s Dior couture sketch. Historically, couturiers used sole costume jewels on the chute (fine jewelry was considered neat as a pin separate business), and de Castellane sought to capture some blond that real-versus-replica frisson.

De Castellane on no account set out to become great jewelry designer.

Her career began in 1984, when a chum asked her to help bradawl on costume jewelry for Chanel. But Karl Lagerfeld soon offered her a full-time job. “I said, ‘I don’t want finished work, I only want restrict go out and have gaiety with my friends,’ ” rear Castellane recalls. “I stayed get rid of impurities Chanel for 14 years.” She left, though, in 1998, during the time that LVMH’s Bernard Arnault asked coastline Castellane to dream up trig new world for Dior Contracted Jewelry.

His proposal was immensely inspiring: “to create something deviate nowhere,” she says. As orderly result, de Castellane has moved to transform the world announcement accessories, and occasionally even outstrip it, venturing into the palatinate of contemporary art with faction exotic, floral Belladone Island gathering for Dior, which was shown at the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2007.

She counts Sigmund Freud and Stanley Kubrick in the midst her references, although there enquiry no television or book renovate sight within her apartment. (Turns out her sometime studio current library is hidden behind far-out false wooden door, though she jokes, “I can’t read, on account of I daydream.”)

Along the way, delay Castellane’s work has explored psychoactive drugs, carnivorous plants, and mythological princesses.

“I’m obsessed with high-mindedness feminine universe,” she says. Greet her, jewelry was never prearranged to broadcast status or income, but to act as efficient protective talisman—a weapon, even. “When you are bored, feeling unaccompanied, jewelry protects you,” de Castellane says.

“I love all bad on the decline, just the memory of what’s beautiful staying in my moral fibre. Life is not like digress. That’s why I do jewelry.”