Here I am, on a rainy Paris day in a temple of stratospherically expensive less-is-more taste. Powdery-grey walls with white cornices stretch into a foggy distance; tinted pink hydrangeas and ghostly sweet peas bunch in crystal vases on spindly-legged mirrored tables that float on pale grey carpet. In one salon (no, not showroom) alcoves like miniature 18th-century private court theatres lined in black velvet display teeny weeny exact copies of couture dresses from the 1947 Dior archive, and the jewels they currently inspire. It is a cross between The Tailor of Gloucester and Aladdin’s cave.  Archi Dior, the latest groundbreaking jewellery collection by Victoire de Castellane, who made her name designing big, brightly coloured comic-book jewels, is having its world premiere (you really can’t call the tasteful fanfare involved a preview) in the couture-cool house of Dior before being shown to very select private clients at the Biennale des Antiquaires this month. “I don’t want to be known as the enamel girl, the lacquer girl,” de Castellane says of her latest collection of one-off pieces composed of diamonds and precious and semi-precious stones. “In the end I got bored of enamel and lacquer and I never want to be bored so I changed everything. I used to love big jewellery but now I can be happy with small jewellery.”  Years ago the place to hang out when in Paris for the collections was by invitation at Karl Lagerfeld’s studio at Chanel, crammed with clothing racks and trestle tables groaning with accessories, while he was preparing a collection and holding court. Chancing one day to find myself in a corner there, I was fascinated by a very young, very tall girl whose long, straight hair had a big black velvet bunny bow in it. Her thick fringe all but hid her pale, almost medieval features. Dressed in a white school shirt and a belted black sweater, she was hefting large trays of costume jewellery to and fro to show Karl. Victoire de Castellane, still dressed in a navy sweater and white shirt, taller than ever in her now trademark platform wedges, laughs when I tell her that we have met before. “Oh yes, when I started with Karl and my job was Polaroiding all the jewellery trays,” she remembers.  And now de Castellane, a rather alien bohemian figure in the bourgeois red-and-gold brocaded clients’ drawing room at Dior, talks about her new collection of real jewels. No more Polaroiding or heaving trays around. The past 14 years that de Castellane has been at Dior have made her into a superstar of the haute bijoux brigade around the place Vendôme, a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur whose collections are copied all round the world.  Why? Well, for a start, escaping as she did from the somewhat monochrome pearl, gold, black and white Chanel costume jewellery world, she revived the sheer madness of the huge cocktail ring, using astonishing 80ct rocks surrounded by brilliantly coloured clashing enamels and lacquers, with tendrils of diamonds. She produced big, big necklaces, brooches and bracelets with all the reckless directness and fun of a lavish child’s comic coupled with a hallucinogenic effect. She designed neon collections of jewelled, lacquered and enamelled flowers inspired by the various roses Christian Dior loved to grow, and set these flowers in twisted diamonds that looked like coral or seaweed.  “Flowers are a classical theme in high jewellery,” she tells me. “But I wanted a change as a lot of jewellery houses were also being creative with flower motifs. So I thought, as Dior couture is a joint identity, I would make a collection that reflected couture. The idea of being abstract but in a figurative way seduced me. This collection is all to do with the way Dior ‘architected’ clothes. I went to the archives and saw all these little silhouettes and drawings, which inspired me to recreate these flowing fabrics in a hard metal like gold.”  All de Castellane’s jewels are very like her – not faint-hearted but amusingly and brilliantly over the top. They all seem to tell some sort of story, and they are fun. “I would like my jewels to give women the power of escaping from reality… allow them to be free because,” she says, “if a woman needs to run away she can take them with her.”  So who is this tall, bold, funny woman? Victoire de Castellane is a conundrum; she has been a very public person, photographed ad infinitum since her teens, when she made staggering appearances as an enfant both chic and terrible at the Chanel studio, or at Le Palace club with Mickey Mouse ears sticking up from her fringe. And yet her private story is a little different – and she protects her privacy. She comes from one of the most illustrious families in France, the Comtés de Provence, who go back to the 10th century. Anciennetés, is what the French call these very old families. Flourishing on her family tree was the wicked Cardinal Rohan, an arch-plotter in the affair of the queen’s necklace, the scandal of which was to be the eventual downfall of Marie Antoinette. “Funny you should have brought that up,” she says. “My grandmother used to wear the Marie Antoinette pearl necklace [the Woolworths heiress] Barbara Hutton gave to her. I remember the necklace and the power of the pearls, which sit directly on the skin… absorbing the essence, like eternity.”  De Castellane’s great-great-uncle Boniface de Castellane, with whom she shares remarkable eyes, and after whom she has named one of her four child­ren, was a notorious and riotously extravagant dandy-aesthete in fin-de-siècle Paris. He was a great friend of Proust, who modelled Robert de Saint-Loup in A la recherche du temps perdu on him. After marrying Anna May Gould, a rather dull dollar princess, to pay off his debts, he promptly spent $10 million on building the wonderful Palais Rose; divorce followed fairly smartly. He ended his days the Marquis de Castellane, but without a sou.  Victoire’s very early life is a bit of a mystery; there is never ever any mention of her parents. She was brought up by her grandmother Sylvia Hennessy, originally Spanish, and a serial bolter with a lot of large, classically set jewellery, Dior couture dresses and many marriages to her name. “She wasn’t a grandmother in the classic sense of the term,” de Castellane says. “She was a bit like a Hollywood heroine.” A close friend of the staggeringly rich Barbara Hutton, Hennessy lived in an eccentric world of writers, Hollywood stars and fashion designers including Christian Dior. Her son by one of her marriages was de Castellane’s uncle Gilles Dufour, the long-time design assistant to Karl Lagerfeld. It was he who launched his very young niece on her metier.  De Castellane herself has been married twice, first to the entrepreneur and contemporary art collector Paul-Emmanuel Reiffers, with whom she has three children, and secondly to the art director Thomas Lenthal, who started the magazines Paradis and Numéro, among other publishing ventures, with whom she has a child.  Before graduating from what I can only describe as the University of Karl, de Castellane went, in a strict navy-blue uniform, to Lübeck in Paris, an extremely grand Roman Catholic school run by nuns. There is still a hint of the bien elevée schoolgirl about her. Her sister, Mathilde Agostinelli, who also works at Dior (with whom she had a bit part in the ball scene of Marie Antoinette directed by Sofia Coppola, another chum), also went to Lübeck, as did a great many other grand ancienneté French girls who work in the fashion world, including Emmanuelle Alt, the editor of Vogue Paris. These girls form a powerful network.  De Castellane is, however, the most creative by far. Her early essays in style, consisting of tightly belted leather jackets, tulle tutus, platform wedges and remakes of antique jewels, which she found in her lunch hour at Chanel, into huge cocktail rings, have developed over the 14 years of her reign at Dior into a masterly and thoughtful series of collections of one-off jewels of staggering virtuosity in their design and their craft.  Archi Dior is the latest chapter. “The scale is much smaller – I don’t admire people who are obsessed by one thing and not able to do different things, it’s very claustrophobic; you have to change,” she says. “I also make extremes – little chains with diamonds, for instance. I have a collection of them and you can’t imagine that I made them, because they are tiny, very small.”  To understand de Castellane’s inspiration for this collection you would have to turn a Dior 1947 couture dress inside out and see the whaleboning, the stitched-down grosgrain-ribbon waistbands, the frou frou petticoats and the hooks and eyes, all of which are the “archi”, or architecture, on which Dior built his classical couture. Take the Ailée emerald necklace, which is astonishing in both its design and its workmanship. It consists of nearly 1,000 diamonds, together with emeralds, tsavorite garnets, blue-green and green tourmalines and demontoid garnets. The necklace is an undulating square-cut, invisibly set ribbon, from which depends a frou-frou of emeralds and diamonds. The Ailée bracelet is a variant on this theme in diamonds, purple, pink and multi-coloured sapphires and rubies.  The famous hourglass-shaped Bar couture jacket is echoed in the Bar en Corolle emerald bracelet of more than 4,500 stones featuring a waisted effect achieved by belting fine striped fringes with diamonds and a large emerald and pink sapphires.  The Corolle collection was one of Dior’s most successful, and the tiny waists and full skirts, some of more than 10 yards, led the collection to be christened the New Look. The Corolle Soir Rubis ring echoes the sheer glamour of the collection. It took more than six months of research and an incredible 900 hours of work in the jewellery atelier. The rubies are the true pigeon’s blood in colour, and the marquise-cut diamonds seem to flow into one another like very heavy ribbed silk. The Corolle Jour emerald necklace and earrings inspired by Dior’s winter 1947 Aladin dress are another tour de force. Technically, though, possibly the most astonishing pieces are the Verticale Godet sapphire earrings featuring a curved lattice of baguette diamonds ending in curved fringes with pear-shaped diamonds depending from them.  “This collection was two years in the making,” de Castellane says. “I’ve grown up, and they are very grown-up pieces. Maybe subconsciously I was thinking there would be a change in the House of Dior towards new modernity. Raf Simon’s last collection was very minimalist, and now we have much more shape – it’s Marie Antoinette-ish, it’s in the air. I think that anyone who is a designer catches the atmosphere – you don’t exactly know what you’re catching, you just do it.”
For Dior’s new jewellery collection the designer Victoire de Castellane found a wealth of inspiration in the couture house’s archive, adding her own bold glamour