Victoire de Castellane, the Artistic Director at Dior Joaillerie, came to give a talk to the management program students on Wednesday June 2nd.
She brought along Philippe Scordia, head of development and production at Dior Joaillerie and Jade Gunatilaka (IFM/Management 2009), who has just joined Dior Joaillerie.
Victoire de Castellane is the artistic director at Dior Joaillerie an activity she set up at Dior 12 years ago (in 1998), after a stint at Chanel.
In her presentation, Hélène Kassimatis, IFM lecturer in charge of accessories, explained that in the jewellery world, '"there is a before and after Victoire de Castellane".
Here are a few quotes from Victoire de Castellane:
Passion
-You never get bored alone if you take your passion to the limit.
-I've loved jewellery since I was a child. My grandmother adored jewellery, and I thought her pieces were huge but they weren't. That's where I developed my love for big jewellery.
-I still work as if I were five years old.
-Solitude and the boredom of childhood helped my imagination to develop.
-When I was small, I was given a piece of jewellery, it was my very first. I got a pair of pliers and I broke it to transform it, my parents were horrified.
-I design on post-its, then with gouaches, then in 3D in the workshop.
-Opal is my favourite stone. I never get tired of it. It is always changing colour. It was rarely used in jewellery, I brought it back and now it is fashionable.
-When I was 19, I was sticking envelopes at Chanel, I didn't know what I wanted to do later on, and I had found school very boring. I was lucky to meet Karl Lagerfeld who spotted me and asked me to stay on.
Inspiration
-What inspires me is my will to create a better world, childhood, musicals, art, people I meet in the street and above all women: all women inspire me.
Telling stories
-My first collection for Dior, « The vampire's fiancée », was in 1998. Since then, the themes of vanities (Memento Mori) and skulls have been done everywhere.
-I like to tell stories with my jewellery. I usually take a story as a starting point. Sometimes I do the opposite and build a story around a stone.
Jewellery
-Jewellery is true, precious and rare. A piece of real jewellery with a real stone lasts a lifetime, unlike costume jewellery.
-I don't always look at what the competition is doing.
-When I started using big, coloured stones, no one took me seriously. Now everyone's doing them.
-I was the first to name my pieces.
Jewellery and haute couture
-A piece of jewellery takes a long time to make, up to two and a half years. It's not the same rhythm as fashion.
-I don't work directly with John Galliano. We don't have the same collection rhythms.
Design and marketing
-Things that work come from the designer, not from marketing..
-It takes courage to paint over gold, for example. There you have to know how to get beyond the worries of the marketing department.
Craftsmanship
-Everything I do is made in France. "It is important to preserve French craftsmanship".
-Craftsmen like to take things to another level, they like to be pushed to invent new techniques, I ask them to do difficult, sometimes impossible things, and we always manage to find a solution.
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