British Vogue: Fleur de Vie
For Dior Maison and Dior Baby artistic director Cordelia de Castellane, everything begins with flowers. “They are my laboratory,” she tells Vogue, “it’s where I start all my collections, my colours and palette.”
Like Christian Dior, who was influenced by his childhood garden at Villa Les Rhumbs, near Granville in Normandy, de Castellane’s love of flowers began with the herbariums she made with her grandmother as a child in the Swiss Alps, pressed inside huge dictionaries. “I always wanted my own garden,” she recalls.
Decades later, her wish finally came true, when, in 2018, she and her husband, banker Igor de Limur, purchased a manor house that they used to rent in L’Oise, a bucolic French département an hour north of Paris. There, she took up gardening as a way of processing her grief from losing her father a few months before. “Working the earth was the best therapy for me,” she says. She stopped following fashion accounts on social media and started following gardeners instead. Case in point: after finding the London-based landscape designer Milan Hajsinek on Instagram, she recruited him to design her garden, which now boasts profusions of David Austin roses, peonies, irises, sweet peas, foxgloves and lavender, as well as a pale blue greenhouse where she hosts cocktail parties all year long.
De Castellane’s horticultural fascination shines through in her new book for Rizzoli, Flower Couture, which comes on the heels of her first, Life in a French Country House, released in 2021. Illustrated with images by photographer Billal Taright, the book captures the lushness of her garden through the seasons along with her charming anecdotes and tips for perfect tablescaping and flower arranging. “A bouquet of white flowers in a silver goblet exudes unrivalled elegance”, she advises, but, “don’t compose bouquets at the same height like a sphere.” For a novice green-fingered enthusiast, she recommends diving in like she did: “Just start by listening to garden podcasts and reading a lot and it will come. You will find it becomes a passion that you cannot get out of.”
