Luxury is self-evident. At Dior too, the dialogue is evident, the influences shared. The fusion between the fashion design studios and those where the House’s timekeepers are invented is spontaneous. A watch is not merely a watch; it is also the living witness to Dior’s dual haute couture and ready-to-wear culture. Regarding couture, they are called “Frou-frou”, “Envol” or “Cancan”, each name coming from a collection or a dress by Monsieur Dior. Worn on the wrist, they have evident good taste and audacious creativity but have also taken root in the story of the House founded in the heart of the 20th century. This is an ongoing story: every second holding surprises, whether it’s the magic of daytime or the enchantment of an elegant evening spent under stars sparkling like diamonds. This is a story about colours, about deeply rooted House codes – Granville pink, Dior grey…– and about lines now part of the history of style, reinterpreted each season by the studio, like those of the Bar suit.
The Dior VIII is an essential embodiment of that daily ready-to-wear elegance. Originally proposed in ceramic, now in steel and gold versions, it offers two facets of elegance in two formats: a graceful 25mm and a more assertive 32 mm. In both cases, this watchmaking benchmark unhesitatingly embraces the new codes from the ready-to-wear runway: the immaculate white and dense black of the ceramic or alligator recalling the models from the spring-summer show, Dior’s DNA colours of pink and blue escaping from a long buttoned cape coat, fluttering in the sapphires on the Dior VIII Baguette, or sparkling diamonds recalling luminous embroidery, like a streak of light…
Starting this year, the taste for fashion makes an even stronger statement with a first-ever choice of accessories in a classic or openly light-hearted mood. Straps that are now seasonal will see the light of day in spring-summer 2015 adorned in white leather piped in peach rubber, while plum leather straps trimmed with blue rubber will be accompanying fall-winter 2015-2016. More pop in style, La D de Dior with its candy-like 19 mm diameter chooses a tone on tone lizard strap for the versions with sapphire, ruby or emerald bezels and coloured bracelets for the 19, 25 and 38 mm formats. Finally, when sporting an all-black dial, it perks up its classic look with a strap in bright and shaded colours as luminous as a cocktail sipped at sunset during the warm, dusky hours of summer…
Evening is a time that is well and truly Dior’s, a time for paying tribute to haute couture. There is the same festive sensuality in the watches as there is in Monsieur Dior’s ball gowns, in the impish yet feline gracefulness of an illustration by Gruau or the avant-garde spirit of fashions by Raf Simons. When Dior pays tribute to Japan with its Esprit Dior Tokyo 2015 collection, the Dior Grand Soir 33 mm models resonate in unison, embellishing their dials with delicate mother-of-pearl origamis fitting snugly into a white, pink or yellow gold case. The unprecedented volumes and the tri-dimensional dial with the couture architecture of the Dior Grand Soir “Frou-frou” 33 mm models are a nod at the Dressmaking atelier… The magic of travel can also be the magic of celebration: the Dior VIII Grand Bal timepieces resuscitate the legendary society balls at the end of the 1940s, the focal point of a cosmopolitan, nomad and spirited jet-set. Equipped with a specially developed functional oscillating weight located on top of the dial, here on the wrist they reproduce the frills and flounces of a Hollywood-style dress, where they are entirely dressed up in feathers, poised one by one on the delicate gold stays of the Dior VIII Grand Bal “Cancan”. Unless we prefer them oozing with the vertiginous sensuality of gold lacework, handwoven by a lady lace-maker from Le Puy-en-Velay, scattered with diamonds and continuously swinging on the black dial of the 88 Dior VIII Grand Bal “Fil d’or” models.
The watchmaking embodiment of couture’s luxurious and carefree spirit, the 15 Dior VIII Grand Bal Pièce unique “Envol” models put on a much more futuristic face when the dial, adorned with scarab beetle elytra marquetry, is set alight with every sway of an oscillating weight in an emphatically graphic design, where white gold and coloured stones create endlessly swirling spirals, all of them exclusively proposed as one-of-a-kind pieces. This taste for design and spare, sharp lines is also cultivated by the Dior VIII Grand Bal “Plissé soleil” models, thanks to a mother-of-pearl petticoat which succeeds in the challenge of being utterly intoxicating yet absolutely rigorous in its architectural construction. Indeed, wasn’t architecture Monsieur Dior’s first calling?
Although there is Op art in each one of these creations, whether they are new or revisited La D de Dior plays at being a bejewelled coquette, shrouded in light made of blue and pink sapphires and emeralds shaded into the diamonds, unless its dial is flirting with the black, green, blue or fiery red of an alligator, satin or lizard strap. This boundless creativity recaptures all the pleasure of the haute couture and ready-to-wear fashions inhabiting each one of the House’s timekeepers. The taste for uniqueness, for knowing how to act whatever the circumstances and the desire to reinvent yourself while remaining faithful to who you are, are all reflected here…
And isn’t this also the very spirit of Dior fashion and the bridges it builds every season between the past and present; between the allusions to Monsieur Dior’s beloved 18th century and an avant-garde high-tech varnish, or the stunning sensuality of a ball gown and the glitter on a sequined jumpsuit. Revisiting its past and pre-empting the future in order to profit from the present, such might be the Dior mantra. In couture as in ready-to-wear, this is not time rediscovered but time reinvented.
