Twenty-five years ago, just after John Derian moved to New York, something shiny caught his eye in a store window on Lafayette Street: an ornate glass cloche, filled with gilded flowers and fruits sat upon a red pin cushion. “I was like, what is that?” The decoupage artist wandered in to find out. The shopkeeper explained it was a globe de mariée—or, a 19th-century French decorative shrine made for a couple’s wedding day. “It was beautiful,” Derian says.
A few years later, Derian went to the famed Avignon antique fair during a trip to the South of France. There, he spotted another globe de mariée displayed on a table. He asked the seller more about it. The tradition of the “marriage dome” began in France during the era of Napoleon III, he learned. After their nuptials, the mother-in-law of aristocratic couples preserved meaningful keepsakes such as flower crowns or bouquets on a mini-throne inside of an enclosed cloche. (“Kind of like the modern-day tradition of putting a piece of cake in the freezer,” says Derian.)
Photo: Courtesy of John Derian
Photo: Courtesy of John Derian
It took months to arrange and was done with the utmost care and artistry. “In addition to displaying the bridal headdress, the cloche would also be decorated with gilt leaves, mirrors, and dried flora. All with specific symbolic meanings. The number of mirrors would represent the number of children desired by the couple. A sheaf of wheat for commitment. Ivy leaves for attachment. Oak leaves for prosperity,” explains Derian. Other common details? Wax birds or fruits. “After the wedding day the cloche would be displayed in the couple’s formal dining room,” he adds.
In the streets of the South of France, he bought it on the spot.
It was far from his last. Over the past two decades, Derian has been meticulously collecting the globes de mariées he finds in Avignon, Montpellier, and Paris. And now, after some careful restoration, he’s putting a select curation of these antiques on the shelves of his famed East Village shop, as well as online.
Photo: Courtesy of John Derian