Dior: The couture creation

With its dial-side rotors designed to mimic the swish of ballgown’s skirt, straps for haute joaillerie made from trainer material and three-dimensional dials decorated to look like details from Mr Dior’s legendary gardens, Dior is most definitely the brand where fashion and watchmaking intersect.

Make no mistake, these are not fashion watches, but high-end timepieces made with the same care and attention as the Maison gives to its couture.

It isn’t surprising that Dior was one of the first major fashion houses to show an interest in proper watchmaking. Its first foray into this world was in 1968, when it launched a collection of women’s watches produced in Switzerland by Bulova. By 1975, it had launched its Black Moon. This dark, moody design was a massive hit made for Dior by licensee Benedom; a watch manufacturer that was latterly inducted into the LVMH family when the Wilmot Group, who owned Dior, went bankrupt in 1981, and CEO Bernaud Arnault bought Dior for a single symbolic franc.

From then on, the watches were made independently for Dior in Switzerland and originally using only precious metals.

Early designs were very geometric rather than the whimsical creations for which it is now known. Straight lines dominated, which went through the dial in a rather avant garde fashion, and the patterns on the straps were extensions of the intersections and diagonals seen on the dials.

Once Dior was taken over by LVMH, the watchmaking side was amped up. It got its own development and manufacturing arm – Les Ateliers Horlogers Dior in La-Chaux-de-Fonds – and started a decade-long process of establishing itself as a watchmaker, not just a fashion house that dabbles in watches.

The first step was the La D de Dior, designed by the head of Dior’s fine jewellery division Victoire de Castellane. Castellane was inspired by the purity of men’s designs, but filtered that simplicity - these watches have no indices and no date - through a feminine lens. The result was a delicate, yet not ultra-feminine design that continues to be a major part of the collection.

Men briefly got a look in in 2004 in the form of the Chiffre Rouge, but the next big launch was 2005’s Christal, which was created by then-creative director John Galliano. A more adorned version of Chanel’s J12, it featured sapphire crystal, more commonly used on watch dials, as pyramids on the bracelet and as marquetry on the bezel; a concept it took to haute horlogerie heights with its jewel-encrusted Dior Christal Tourbillon in 2008 and 2009’s version with a mysterious movement, where sapphire crystal is used to create the movement components so it appears invisible.