The fringed bangs, fashioned before she was five years old, the improbably high heels, the flared (preferably black) skirts: Victoire de Castellane¹s silhouette is a poem in itself. Her eyes convey a mix of candour and fantasy, and the ever present smile is often cheeky.

A Parisienne, Victoire de Castellane grew up in an aristocratic family whose origins can be traced back to the 10th century. Among the Castellane clan there have been Provençal money-coining Prince Regnants, a few bishops, peers de France, generals, Talleyrand, a Marshall Governor of Lyon, and the umpteenth leading light, Victoire’s great-grand-uncle: dandy and legend of the Parisian Second Empire, Boni de Castellane, whose soirées, hosted in his illustrious Palais Rose on the Avenue Foch, were renowned as being the most remarkable of the entire Belle Époque.

Her grandmother Sylvia Hennessy along with her friend Barbara Hutton was champions of both enormous jewellery and consummate extravagance. Victoire de Castellane accomplished her first feat of jewellery-making at the tender age of five: she dismantled a priceless charm-bracelet to make a pair of earrings. Her mother was incensed; her creativity was quenched. At age twelve, she created her first ring but her mother still had cause to be disgruntled: in order to get the precious metal, and with not a second thought, she melted down her religious medals.

Indifferent to conventions but with an inherent sense of technical challenge, the road was paved for Victoire de Castellane. By the time she’d settled on the great Place Vendôme at the end of the 20th century, Victoire de Castellane was passionate about the type of jewellery driven more by imagination than convention. Her mixed sources of inspiration - the naivety of Technicolor, the sophistication of CinemaScope, botanical surprises, butterfly wings, nature’s splendours, Hollywood and Bollywood, American cartoons from the 1950s, actresses, ballet-dancers, a woman’s curves and attitude, Japanese figurines, acidulous and blissfully carefree pop culture - play with the barriers between natural and artificial, real and fake, naive and beautiful, minute and excessive.

Victoire de Castellane seeks out the most astonishing gemstones. Whereas in the past the world of jewellery had scant disregard for semi-precious stones, Victoire de Castellane, listening more to her heart than to convention, embraces them, opposing the soporific classicism that has been ruling jewellery since the end of the 1970s. A shrewd move indeed: since 2004, these semi-precious stones have been officially acknowledged as precious, thanks to their scarcity and lustre. Enormous amethysts (enormous being the key word here), mad morganites, citrines and aquamarines, demented green beryls: nothing is ever too much for Victoire de Castellane.

Nonetheless, everything starts from a sketch on a Post-it note. I wish I could have my brain scanned, she says. The technical preparations sometimes take up to two years and often mean juggling both perseverance and frustration. But the monumental lengths of time can be more easily justified when observing some of the highly sophisticated mechanisms that Victoire de Castellane has to implement. Although new waves of ideas are constantly breaking the status quo of jewellery design - arousing the sort of inventiveness required to overcome improbable technical challenges, Victoire de Castellane nonetheless sticks to her guns: everything must be hand-made in Parisian workshops. Nothing is mechanized.

Belladone Island was 2007’s jewellery explosion, with its extraordinary carnivorous plants and omnivorous butterflies set in rough Ethiopian opals, fancy cut diamonds and Paraíba tourmalines clashing with gold lacquered with panther pink and insomniac green. And the new collection is again a visual and technical rollercoaster: Milly Carnivora, aka the carnivorous baby of Belladone Island, born in Milly-la-Forêt. The lacquer conceived for the Diorettes, the flowers from Monsieur Dior¹s garden in Milly-la-Forêt, is used here to its full effect. The lacquer originates from Victoire¹s indignation: “Gold only exists in three colours. It’s insane!”. She thus decides to resort to an unprecedented lacquering. And here comes chlorophylle metallic green gold, vermilion gold and shades more baroque than the bodywork of a 1950s American car. Transluscent purple gold, hysterically chromatic gold in shades reminiscent of Amazonian birds!

Victoire de Castellane launched Dior¹s Haute Joaillerie department on January 1, 1998. She currently lives in Paris with her children.