When Victoire de Castellane, high jewellery designer at Christian Dior, unleashed her Belladone Island collection nearly two years ago, even the seen-it-all world of luxury gems was taken by surprise. She was already known for her iconoclastic mixes of coloured stones and oversized, unconventional shapes, but here she seemed to enter another, weirder world.
Arranged around a boat shape in the old Jeu de Paume art gallery in Paris, they were strangely surreal – bright, decadent, slightly creepy jungle forms that seemed based on the plant of a fevered imagination, threatening to drip poisoned dew or ensnare you in a tendril.
