The legendary costume ball was held at Palazzo Labia on September 3, 1951. Christian Dior created several costumes for his guests and later recalled that this was the most beautiful performance he had ever seen in his life or will see in the future. Extravagant outfits and masks inspired the designers of the fashion house to create a limited edition watch within the Dior Grand Bal line.
Their special feature is the signature Dior Inversé caliber 11 ½ with a rotor placed on the dial. Designers have submitted many ideas on how to design this functional part of the mechanism, which makes the arrows move. Feathers, pleating, fans, thinnest cuts of colored ornamental stones were used. And now the Dior Inversé self-winding rotor is a carnival mask, which, moreover, rotates on its axis. The symmetrical, perfectly weighted construction of platinum, gold, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, apatites, opals and other precious stones is colored with the feathers of a Creole cockerel.
Each of the 11 Dior masquerade masks is unique and requires up to 300 hours of manual labor. Hour and minute gold hands are fixed on top of the rotor mask.
The dial is made of polished to a mirror shine of white or yellow gold (in some models you can see the silhouette of the lower part of a woman's face). The 36 mm white gold case is completely covered with baguette and round diamonds, and the case back is a thin section of malachite, lapis lazuli, chrysoprase or other colored stone that repeats the main color scheme of the watch.
1 of 8 Dior Grand Bal Masqué # 1 © Dior Grand Bal Masqué Press Service # 2 © Dior Grand Bal Masqué Press Service # 3 © Dior Grand Bal Masqué Press Service # 5 © Dior Grand Bal Masqué Press Service # 6 © Dior Grand Bal Masqué press service # 7 © Dior Grand Bal Masqué press service # 8 © Dior Grand Bal Masqué press service # 11 © press service
The series includes 11 unique pieces of the Dior Grand Bal Masqué.>