Diorissima is not Matisse and Picasso.

© Kirill Dorokhov

It is their more refined jewellery continuation — narrative Haute Joaillerie that restores to the mosaic of personal statement and worldview, so characteristic of modernism, its rightful place within the theatrical luxury of a baroque setting.

Descending from the ancient Provençal aristocratic house of de Castellane, Victoire has captured in her painterly vision the fairy-tale polychromy of southern France's nature — a vision that found its way into the apotheosis of Dior's longtime jeweller: the Diorissima collection. Yet the collection draws its inspiration not from southern flora alone, for Christian Dior himself hailed from northern France, where the family's ancestral home stood on the very edge of the Channel cliffs, with a magnificent flowering garden cascading down the seaside slope.

The collection's name, incidentally, is more ingenious than the collection itself — a feat that is harder to pull off than it sounds. It captures two distinct principles of de Castellane's jewellery thinking at once. The first, which arguably rivals Christian Dior's own gift for allegorical philosophy, lies in the venue chosen for the collection's presentation: Venice. A city — no, a miraculous kingdom upon the water — that has calmly survived a thousand revolutions, wars, and internal upheavals, known as La Serenissima: Italian for "The Most Serene." Like de Castellane herself.

Amid the storms of content, collaborations, and drops, amid the luxury crisis against the backdrop of a societal one and the constant rumble of protest, Dior's steadfast jeweller on the Place Vendôme has spent twenty-five years doing one and the same thing — opening imaginary cabinets filled with fish, four-leaf clovers, and clouds from a Renaissance age in an age of decline. Such reclusive devotion to one's craft is unusual for an industry obsessed with novelty, and is at once amusing and quietly touching.

The second principle — wordplay, alongside the sincere playfulness and grotesque composition so inherent to the collection — is embodied in pieces like the Boucles d'Oreille Diorissima Nuage Heureux: a sun peeking out from behind an opal cloud, with tiny pear-cut diamonds falling like raindrops, as if lifted from a child's drawing. For a price that confirms you are not, in fact, looking at a child's drawing. In turn, for that price, de Castellane takes the visual language of Matisse — whose conceptualism expressed itself in paper — and places it into a context that demands a colossally more demanding creative threshold, one so roundly rejected by modernism itself: into luxury, into materiality, into baroque. As in the magnificent Happy Flower Brooch — a rectangular frame of sapphires, garnets, turquoises, and lacquered mother-of-pearl enclosing a riotous garden where the flat color fields of modernism are built not from paper but from platinum and stone.

(Boucles d'Oreille Diorissima Nuage Heureux. Credits: Dior, May 2026)

(Happy Flower Brooch. Credits: Dior, May 2026)

So who will appreciate it?

Those who can imagine an F.P. Journe watch on their wrist — because a work of art of this kind, whether a timepiece or a necklace, is something personal, a singular authorial expression that, without the context of its creator and their vision, becomes merely an expensive investment or a vehicle for passing family values down through generations. There is only one Venice, and there are only one hundred and forty-one Diorissima pieces — but that is never too many.

It is worth noting, however, that this collection may find particular resonance with connoisseurs from Asia, a region that accounts for as much as sixty-six percent of the entire luxury jewellery market, with a capitalisation of approximately fifty billion dollars. Chinese buyers, who make up two-thirds of that Asian segment, may find a reflection of their own cultural tradition — one of vivid, saturated ornament that leaves no surface empty, of festive chromatic intensity — in de Castellane's polychromy. It fits that sensibility with remarkable, and entirely unintentional, naturalness.

But if a “Matissima” were known the world over, Diorissima may well remain the province of a rather smaller circle of devotees of jewellery as statement — and in our time, that is perhaps for the better.