Dior may be a quintessentially French haute couture house, but its watches are Swiss made, and the new one-off Dior VIII Grand Bal Envol may be its strongest horological design statement yet. A watch combining white and yellow gold, tsavorite garnets and diamonds, all set off by hand-painted fluorescent pink hands and a metallic green strap, is a daring but stunning statement. Christian would be proud.
Dior designs its watches at the company headquarters on Paris's Avenue Montaigne, and these sketches are then sent to its watchmaking studios in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, where the watchmakers must first check the technical feasibility and then find the best way to turn those design fantasies into a horological reality. The Grand Bal collection itself was created to emulate the swirl of a gown lightly sweeping over the dance floor. "A ball gown must be one of your dreams, and must also make you a dream-like creature," Christian Dior once said.
The spiralling gold fan design decorating the rotor of the Envol is set with mother-of-pearl inserts and ribbons of diamonds that accentuate this key mechanical component. The phosphorescent green on the dial was obtained from the wings of scarab beetles and set using the delicate technique of marquetry decoration. Though each Envol is a unique one-off creation, two variations have been seen so far: the No.1, which has diamonds around the bezel, and the No.5, framed with green tsavorite garnets.
Grand Bal watches boast an ingenious automatic movement known as the Dior Inversé. Developed with Soprod in Switzerland, its standout element is a rotor that has been placed on the dial rather than underneath it. The VIII range is divided into three sub-collections — Dior VIII, Dior VIII Montaigne and Dior VIII Grand Bal — and is named as such because the couture house was founded on 8 October 1946, its first collection was called 'En Huit', and its headquarters sit in the French capital's 8th arrondissement.
