Dior’s new Diorissima Haute Joaillerie collection feels less like traditional high jewellery and more like a dream assembled from fragments.
Created by Victoire de Castellane, the collection brings together three very different worlds: lush gardens, underwater landscapes and celestial skies. Instead of keeping them separate, she lets them collide.
Clover appears beside coral. Wisteria meets bubbles. Fruit clusters sit alongside suns, eclipses and what Dior describes as “happy clouds.” The result is intentionally strange, colourful and almost childlike in its imagination.
Collage, But in Gemstones
The idea of collage is central to Diorissima.
Rather than creating jewellery around one clean motif, de Castellane layers references in the way an artist might cut and rearrange images on a page. Botanical forms become abstract. Aquatic details become almost cosmic. Familiar shapes suddenly feel slightly unreal.
That tension between naturalism and abstraction gives the collection its personality.
It also feels very true to de Castellane, who has spent years treating Dior jewellery as a space for storytelling rather than restraint. Since becoming the house’s jewellery artistic director in 1998, colour, fantasy and unexpected combinations have become central to her work.
A Very Dior Idea of Nature
Nature has always been deeply embedded in Dior’s vocabulary.
Christian Dior’s love of gardens and flowers has inspired countless collections, particularly through roses, lush landscapes and the gardens of Milly la Forêt. Diorissima takes that heritage and pushes it somewhere less literal.
This is not simply flower jewellery.
It is nature imagined as a fantasy universe, where plants, sea life and sky coexist without needing to make logical sense. The collection also touches on Christian Dior’s interest in superstition and signs, which helps explain the appearance of suns, eclipses and celestial motifs.
Colour Does Most of the Talking
Diorissima is unapologetically colourful.
The pieces combine vivid gemstones with lacquer, allowing opaque and transparent surfaces to sit beside one another. Dior’s ateliers also use a doublet technique, layering two stones to produce more nuanced and unexpected shades.
That technical detail matters because colour here is not decoration added at the end.
It is what gives the collection movement and emotion. Some combinations feel lush and tropical, others almost underwater, while the celestial pieces become sharper and more graphic.
The jewels feel alive rather than static.
Presented Like a Living Fantasy
Dior unveiled Diorissima at the Palazzo del Casinò on the Lido in Venice, turning the presentation itself into part of the story.
Jonathan Anderson also created haute couture silhouettes specifically for the presentation, including bustier dresses, draped pieces, flowing suits, pleated chiffon and looks worked with velvet, organza and pearls. It was his first time creating haute couture models for a Dior high jewellery presentation.
The clothes did not compete with the jewellery. They helped build the strange little world around it.
