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| Photo by Freeimages.com/Paulo Oliveira Santos |
by Annabel Davidson, The Daily Telegraph, June 09, 2016
Red, white, and blue – translate those colours into jewellery and you automatically think diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. So far, so dull, but in the hands of Dior Joaillerie, the colours of the Union Jack morph from the traditional to the exceptional.
With the opening of the new, highly-anticipated Dior boutique at 160-162 New Bond Street, even the dozens of gleaming black Mercedes ferrying the luxury brand’s VIP clients and friends to the store couldn’t distract from the Union Jack flag flapping from the building’s roof. And inside, the colour-theme continued – subtly, chicly, but unmistakably in those very British tones.
The new Dior boutique as a whole is extraordinary, so it’s impossible to ignore the rest of it in favour of the expanded watch and jewellery rooms. Designed by that king of modern luxury, the architect Peter Marino, the vast, four-story boutique comprises the entire Dior offering, catering for women, men, unbelievably well-dressed children, and even the home. Sumptuously decorated throughout with that very French, very Dior grey, and divided into rooms that flow effortlessly from one to the other, the space feels like someone’s extremely large, extremely elegant home. There are even Dior-clad mannequins lounging on the poufs just inside the entrance who look so relaxed they demand a second-glance to make sure they’re not actually clients playing statues.
But this is a jewellery column, so onto the gems. To honour the new boutique, a collection of limited-edition watch and jewellery pieces has been created, all in the theme of red, white and blue. The Archi Dior Bar en Corolle ring, a bejewelled homage to Monsieur Dior’s famous Bar suit with its dramatically cinched waist, comes with a tight belt of rubies or sapphires, while the Cygne or ‘swan’ rings hold sapphires or rubies at their hearts.
The colours aren’t limited to the primary versions of red and blue however. The ruby version of the Milieu du Siecle ring in pink gold blends white diamonds with blood-red rubies and pale pink sapphires for a less uniform expression of the petals which inspired it – originally from the flower-like Junon dress from Monsieur Dior’s 1949 fall/winter couture collection.
Elsewhere, blues are represented via soft, purple spinels, as in the central stone of another Cygne ring, delicately framed with tiny blue sapphires in a puff of plumage-like diamond fronds. Purple spinels appear elsewhere in Cygne earrings, where they hang from sapphire clusters topped with plumes of white diamonds like the headdress of a showgirl from Les Folies Bergeres.
The use of the Union Jack’s colours may be all over this limited-edition collection, but the tribute stops there – there’s nothing gimmicky about the pieces. Dior has simply imbued existing designs with new tones; they’re subtle, chic, and oh-so-French.
This article was written by Annabel Davidson from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
