French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance on Dior Maison collaboration, craft and why time is the new luxury

Showcased within this garden are the Corolle lamps, a series of table lamps that casts intricate geometric shadow patterns, by award-winning designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance. Continuing the collaboration between Dior Maison and the French designer that began in 2019, this year’s presentation marks a significant deepening of that dialogue, one that took Duchaufour-Lawrance into the Dior archives, across to the glass masters of Murano, and all the way to the bamboo weavers of Japan.

The starting point was archival research, though not the kind conducted at a remove. Duchaufour-Lawrance describes being given access to the storied vaults at 30 Montaigne, the original Dior headquarters and flagship store: “We opened some drawers and some boxes.

They’re always beautiful, detailed, a beautiful dress, a beautiful top. And everything is so precious.” From these encounters, motifs emerged, the cannage cane pattern, the pleated lines of the Corolle skirt, which he translated into sketches, and from sketches into craft briefs for the workshops.

The evolution from the first collection is deliberate. “The first collection was very simple, only three colours, transparent, without any texture,” he shares. “Then, Dior wanted to explore much more the savoir-faire around the glass. They proposed we do this project in Murano, where we could have an infinity of possibilities. Let’s explore the haute couture of the glass.”

It would be tempting to call the lamps decorative objects. Duchaufour-Lawrance resists that word, and yet the pools of geometric shadow they throw onto the floor are among the most arresting things at this year’s Salone.

His reasoning is precise: “The beauty of it is that the material itself is doing the story. You don’t control it. It’s really the magic of the light and the beauty of this intangible material, working with the thickness, working with any asperity of the glass, creating an object by itself.”

The challenge, he explains, was constant calibration. “There are things we abandoned because there was not enough transparency. It was always to find the balance between the work of the glass and the projection of the light,” he elaborates. “Sometimes, I was more focused on just the projection than the object itself.” The bamboo lamps required a different solution: rattan, traditionally used for cannage, was too unwieldy for the precision the design demanded.

Bamboo, split, refined into strips, soaked and woven by hand in Kyoto, was the only material that could deliver the fineness he was after.

Asked what he hopes Dior’s audience takes from the collection, Duchaufour-Lawrance is characteristically candid: “I don’t really think about it.” What he does think about, at length, is what luxury actually means in a world where craft has become either invisible or inaccessible. His answer is a single word: time.

“Every project with craft takes so much time, and luxury is one of the only environments where you can really do it,” he says. “I would love that craft come back to our everyday lives in a more simple way, but today, craft is either exploited labour, made in places where people are not respected for what they are doing, or it’s luxury because it is very time-consuming and at the end quite expensive.”

There is no easy resolution to that tension, and Duchaufour-Lawrance isn’t pretending there is. But standing in this amber-lit room at Palazzo Landriani, surrounded by the shadows his lamps have conjured and the dreamlike garden world born out of high craftsmanship and global collaborations, it’s evident that time, here, has been exceptionally well spent.

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