Sorry about the no-show on Thurs­day and Fri­day — I’m back down from the clouds, rested, and feet planted firmly on the ground. Thank you for your patience.

In review­ing the images from the Chanel and Chris­t­ian Dior Spring Cou­ture 2010 shows, the most appar­ent design schematic for jew­elry was pro­por­tion. It seemed that Karl Lager­feld saw the nineteenth-century cor­sage brooch, a large, impos­ing orna­ment, as hav­ing con­tem­po­rary rel­e­vance in a more real­is­tic, some­what smaller, inter­pre­ta­tion. The beaded details, pastes, and embroi­deries in his designs were placed higher, closer to the face; a flat­ter­ing idea based on the turn of the twentieth-century way of styling jew­elry. The top of one dress was cre­ated from chains of glit­ter­ing white crys­tals. This was the col­lier, a choker length jewel, as both neck­line and adorn­ment. The effi­ciency of the idea read as the kind of bril­liant short­hand, which Larg­er­feld does masterfully.

How charm­ing are these fil­a­ment insecta scat­ter pins? There is an ease, a ver­sa­til­ity, to the con­cept of sug­gested form rather than a lit­eral one. These pins would float equally well on a softly printed dress or casual coat with­out ref­er­ence to sea­son, or even to species. Mod­ernist jew­elry design­ers of the 1940s and ‘50s took this con­cept and turned it into an art form.

John Gal­liano for Chris­t­ian Dior pushed the ele­va­tor but­ton and took us to the pent­house of romance. The clothes, small waisted with cas­cad­ing skirts and crisply nipped jack­ets, were paired with antique-inspired jew­els of grand-grander-grandest pro­por­tions. The enor­mity of the paste drops and marquise-shaped crys­tals served as the tongue-in-cheek punc­tu­a­tion to the whole. Irony is a uni­ver­sal motif, and when done with wit, trans­verses our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion as smoothly as water on glass. You could almost cast the jew­els in Tim Burton’s Alice In Won­der­land. All the gor­geous exag­ger­a­tions apply, so back into the ele­va­tor, and down the rabbit-hole we go…

Chris­t­ian Dior Spring 2010