Christian Dior spent his childhood enamored with Japanese art and translated its sensibilities into his legendary designs. Now, Cordelia de Castellane has found new life in his bird and cherry blossom motifs.
Jardin Japonais from Christian Dior Haute Couture/Spring-Summer 1953. Collection Dior Héritage, Paris. © Jacques Rouchon. Image courtesy of Christian Dior.
Though Christian Dior never traveled to the Land of the Rising Sun, Japanese art shaped his aesthetic from childhood. In his 1957 autobiography Dior by Dior, the couturier recalls sitting by the stairwell of his house in Granville, Normandy, and gazing at its panels of imitation Utamaro and Hokusai prints for so long that he came away with a bruised bottom.
“Those long meditations left me with a strong taste for the Japonais-eries,” he wrote of the space he thought of as his personal Sistine Chapel. “I still love silks embroidered with flowers and fantastic birds and use them in my collections.”
One emblematic example is his Jardin Japonais dress from the maison’s Spring/Summer 1953 Haute Couture collection. Draped to accentuate feminine curves, it features a graceful, plunging neckline and a print of a bird perched on a cherry blossom branch. That piece made a punk-inflected comeback as part of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Spring/Summer 2017 Haute Couture collection presented in Tokyo a few years ago. This spring, it returns once again in another guise, as the tableware collection Les Cerisiers (“the cherry trees”) by Dior Maison artistic director Cordelia de Castellane.
“There’s a poetry about Japan that really reflects who Monsieur Dior was,” says the designer in her Paris studio. “He was very sensitive to life’s transience, to these extraordinary spectacles of beauty that blossom and fade.”
Back in an era when chic women changed outfits multiple times from morning to night, the couturier offered them an afternoon dress; today, de Castellane captures that moment and preserves it for the table. The 16-piece range includes white plates rimmed with cherry blossom branches, a clear glass pitcher or sky-blue vases encircled with pink blooms, embroidered raffia placemats, candles, and two boxes developed in collaboration with the Manufacture des Emaux de Longwy, a specialist in enameled ceramics founded in 1798. Though rooted in a thousand years of history, de Castellane notes that she found the cherry blossom as modern as some of the vintage Dior couture she rediscovered in her grandmother’s wardrobe: coats, an evening dress for Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s Surrealist Ball of 1972, and a gray Prince of Wales suit whose jacket she now wears with jeans.
In the same spirit, de Castellane recently designed a tablescape pairing Les Cerisiers with a bright pink tablecloth, though marble or wood surfaces would look just as
contemporary. “Monsieur Dior found it incomplete to just dress people and not extend his ideas to their surroundings,” she adds. “Very beautiful things like a Bar jacket go beyond fashion; they’re eternal. Les Cerisiers is the logical continuation of that.”
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