Dior embraces colour for princess of time

DIOR is a brand steeped in femininity, with an elegant woman - Laurence Nicolas - as the head of its timepieces division.

Laurence Nicolas

TO say that watch brands try to outdo each other in the design of their booths at the annual Baselworld watch fair is an understatement. There was a lot of attention placed on the design - and size - of the booths this year, precipitated by an expansion of the exhibition space.

Every brand had a new booth design, some spectacular, some just big and some a little perplexing. One of the standouts in design terms was Dior's booth, or pavilion, as the company prefers to call it. The building, which has a silver mesh-like facade was, according to a press release, inspired by the palace of Versailles and its gardens. A garden wall graced the staircase to the upper level, where the carpet was a pixelated version of a classical French garden. Apart from the greenery, it was all grey and silver and black and very softly lit. The design aesthetic also extended to the staff working on the booth: basically, they all wore black. So it comes as something of a surprise to discover from the president of Dior Timepieces that colour is actually the design signature of Dior's watches.

"Mr Dior used to say that black and white may suffice, but why deprive ourselves of colour?" says Laurence Nicolas, president of Dior Timepieces. "That is why we are a brand that is based on the ultimate in femininity and joyfulness. It's not a matter of dressing in black to give strength. We are not in a company where the woman is a sort of power woman - it's more of a princess woman. The inspiration for Mr Dior was really to wake up the princess in every woman, which is why the Chateau Versailles was such an inspiration for us."

That statement might seem something like from another era, but it's worth remembering that we are talking about the watch industry here, which is about as male-dominated an industry as you can get. Dior is one of the few watch brands that is more focused on women's timepieces than those for men. For most watch brands, the men's models come first and women's watches are often treated as an after-thought. So while Nicolas's view on the Dior watch customer might seem retrograde, it's no more so than the watch industry's view of men.

In the men's watch universe it's all about strength. The materials employed to make men's watches are used because they are stronger, harder, and indestructible and they come with the technical terminology to match. Inspiration in the design of men's watches also comes from typically macho pursuits such as Formula One racing, aviation, sailing or world exploring. But for Dior, a brand steeped in femininity, inspiration comes from something less rarefied - that is, nature - and even the materials used have a feminine edge to them. What other brand would use feathers in their watch movements as Dior did when it launched the Dior VIII Grand Bal last year? Its automatic movement with an oscillating weight was composed of feathers. "This movement occupies a unique place in watchmaking because complications created specifically for women are rare," says Nicolas.

Nowhere is the use of colour in the design of Dior watches more obvious than in the one-of-a-kind Dior VIII Grand Bal Piece Unique collection of watches. Dior has produced three of these spectacular watches this year which are each decorated with between 20 and 25 different stones (pictured right). "With this collection we want to reproduce the colours of nature and we use an amazing set of stones, every one of them being natural and not treated, so it is something very honest," says Nicolas. "It takes 18 months from the first sketch to the delivery of the pieces two days ago," Nicolas told WISH in Basel in April. "Each piece involves about 300 hours of computer work just to work out what colours we want and to match them with the gemstones we want to use, and about 20 different hands work on the one watch for the various skills involved". The Grand Bal Piece Unique watches have a 38mm automatic movement and feature Dior's distinctive "inverse" calibre, whereby the oscillating weight is on the front dial of the watch. The watches sell for between $100,000 to 200,000, depending on the type of stones used.

In the broader scheme of things, Dior is relatively new to watches and produced its first watch collection in 1975. Until the company opened its own watch manufacturing unit at La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2001, its watches were predominantly fashion accessories rather than serious timepieces. Nicolas was appointed president of Dior watches in 2008 after a decade as the head of the brand's fine jewellery division, and says 2001 was a defining moment for Dior. It was then the company decided to "reconcile the creativity of the haute couture that is feminine and elegant with the savoir-faire of the Swiss watch industry, which we know is industrial and masculine. That's been the challenge, to put these two universes in harmony". The use of feathers in the Grand Bal Plume models is one way that the two worlds have come together to produce a unique timepiece. "It was a technical feat that many said couldn't be done but the miracle happened and it has been almost sold out, so we decided to go further in this direction this year and used feathers in different colours," she says.

As a woman running a company that, for the most part, makes watches for women, Nicolas dismisses the notion that women are not interested in mechanical timepieces. "I think women always find the inside of a watch as interesting as the outside and, personally, I think the inside must be as elegant as the outside," she says as she picks up a piece from the Grand Soir collection of mechanical watches. "You can see the oscillating weight on the back of the watch that we have customised with mother-of-pearl lace and diamonds. No one knows that you have this customised oscillating weight on the watch except you because you are the one that wears it - this is luxury. And a woman can appreciate that; otherwise, the lingerie business would not be so huge, right?"