“I like being obsessed,” said Olympia Le-Tan on Thursday night as she welcomed visitors to the special project she had created for Pitti in Florence. And with an opening line like that, it was almost impossible to resist the web that Le-Tan had woven in the Museo Bellini, yet another of the jaw-droppingly beautiful Renaissance [...]

Tonight marks the opening of the first exhibition from Victoire de Castellane (left), the moonlighting debut of the Paris-based jeweler (who daylights, if you will, as the founding designer of Dior Haute Joaillerie). Her precious jewels-cum-decorative objects, Fleurs d’Excès (the “Flowers of Excess,” which have all the psychotropic vividness of Baudelaire’s famous Fleurs du Mal [...]

Dior Haute Joaillerie designer Victoire de Castellane is known for her candy-colored, vibrantly trippy creations. (As she revealed in our video shopping trip with her, she gravitates toward mushrooms—presumably for accessories only.) Her new project, done under her own name and separate from her Dior endeavors, mines all of the hallucinogenic allusions from her earlier [...]

Remember Eyjafjallajökull? Olympia Le-Tan sure does. The Icelandic volcano—and its lingering clouds of ash, which wrecked havoc on European aviation for a good while—forced the accessory designer to cancel a much anticipated trip to Thailand. “I was so angry, and I began to imagine that this might be the end,” Le-Tan said at a cocktail [...]

The first day of Paris fashion week is usually judged too early for a bash, but you’d never know it from the crowd that crammed into Vincent Darré’s tiny interiors shop, Maison Darré, yesterday. There—packed to the rafters, almost, and spilling into the street—were Catherine Deneuve, Diane von Furstenberg, Pierre Bergé, Christian Louboutin, Mario Testino, [...]

“I made up an imaginary kingdom about kings and queens of lost civilizations,” said Victoire de Castellane, explaining the thinking behind her incredible collection of diamond pendants and rings for Dior. Each piece—kings for pendants, queens for rings—wears its own crown, tiara, necklace, lace collar, or ruff, and even earrings of their own, in some [...]

Only a very big jewelry box could house Victoire de Castellane’s outsize, irrepressibly imaginative creations for Dior Joaillerie this season, and that’s just what we discovered at our appointment at the company’s Paris headquarters yesterday. Peering over its side to show off her Idylle aux Paradis collection of cuffs, some of which convert into brooches [...]