Dior Maison unveils 'Le Fantastique Voyage de Monsieur Dior' tableware collection

French luxury house Dior has unveiled 'Le Fantastique Voyage de Monsieur Dior', a Dior Maison collection inspired by Jules Verne's novel 'Around the World in Eighty Days'. According to the brand, the story left a deep impression on Christian Dior during his childhood, shaping his imagination with a sense of adventure that never faded. The collection was developed under Cordelia de Castellane, artistic director of Dior Maison, who joined the house in 2012 to design Baby Dior before becoming Dior Maison's first artistic director in 2017. She drew on Christian Dior's early fascination with the novel to build a set of free-spirited illustrations that revisit Verne's fictional universe.

A hot-air balloon serves as the collection's central motif, running across a range of Limoges porcelain pieces: a service of six dinner and dessert plates, two oval serving dishes and a trinket tray. The designs are crafted with signature Dior motifs, including the CD monogram, the star, the bee, the rose, the clover and the lily of the valley.

Two additional earthenware trinket trays extend the collection through Dior Maison's continued partnership with the Manufacture des Émaux de Longwy, a French ceramics maker founded in 1798. The manufactory has produced several previous pieces for the house, including trinket trays finished in enamel with 24-carat gold detailing.

The color palette varies across the range, with rims in green, blue, pink and yellow. On one plate, the lily of the valley is illustrated as its own hot air balloon, tied together by a pale blue ribbon. The two oval serving dishes carry more elaborate compositions, showing clusters of airships and balloons rendered in a fine, sketch-like style and bordered in maroon and gold.

Dior Maison regularly builds its object collections around recurring house references. Past examples include a two-tone porcelain service revisiting a black-and-white design created by Christian Dior in 1955, and a toile de Jouy line applied to plates, trays and vases. 'Le Fantastique Voyage de Monsieur Dior' follows the same approach, giving each individual piece its own name rather than a simple product number. Names cited by the brand reference destinations, historical eras or symbols, among them 'Survol au siècle des lumières', which translates to 'flight over the age of enlightenment', and 'Escale du porte-bonheur', meaning 'stopover of the lucky charm'.

Dior Maison describes the collection as a voyage between heaven and earth, in which Verne's fantasy journey becomes, in the brand's words, a way of life.