As Dior Joaillerie’s creative director, Victoire de Castellane has developed a very distinctive style while still managing to capture the essence of the fashion house, drawing on Christian Dior’s love of gardens and his favorite flower, the roses, his fascination with the sumptuous décor of Versailles, as well as the Maison’s haute couture roots and its use of beautiful fabrics.

For the twentieth anniversary of Dior Joaillerie, which has helmed the entire time, de Castellane designed a 99-piece collection, the jewellery house’s largest to date, that focuses on stones and cuts. “It’s as if I had put all my collections from the past twenty years into a shaker and what popped out were freeze-frames and very large pixelated close-ups. In the end, what’s left is material and colour,” the designer remarks.

 Daring asymmetry and clashing colours are at the heart of the new Gem Dior collection, a phonetic play on J’aime Dior (I love Dior) in French, that was first presented in Venice in June.

 Mixing and matching from a rich colour spectrum of gemstones, from classic diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and rubies to unusual cobalt blue spinels, cyan tourmalines and purple garnets, de Castellane plays with the myriad of hues, and layers different stone cuts, such as baguettes with pears or ovals with marquises, to create unusual multi-faceted clusters that recall crystal-like formations and showcase the colour gradation of natural stones.

 Though the Gem Dior collection also offers some more-monochrome looks, at its most extravagantly colourful, the multicolour Anglais Ruby Ring features no fewer than 9 different types of stone in a rainbow with a ruby, blue sapphires, spessartite and tsavorite garnets, pink sapphires, purple garnets, emeralds, diamonds and a yellow sapphire.

 Castellane says she uses gems on her rings “like a little packet of stones that have been placed on the finger. A throw of stones like a throw of the dice. They topple over one another and wedge together to create effects of volume and relief just like geological strata or certain minerals such as pyrite, which have very geometric constructions.”

 The jewellery pieces are given names that are evocative of their predominant colour (Poppy, Icicle, Lime, Daffodil, Vert Tilleul), each one is a declaration of love to stones, in turn geometric or organic, but always asymmetrical in design and use of colour.