Jewelers Nurture Nature in January High Jewelry Collections
PARIS — Despite frigid January temperatures in Paris, nature was thriving in the high jewelry ateliers.
While many cornerstone brands of Place Vendôme are planning to show their newest collections later in the year, be it in Paris or at the ever-expanding range of glittering traveling showcases, there was no shortage of new creations for this first rendezvous of the year.
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Trees were the source of inspiration — and life as we know it — that De Beers Jewellers paid homage to with the first chapter of the Essence of Nature collection.
“The studio really found a powerful territory of expression because nature isn’t just flowers and a romantic vision,” said chief executive officer Céline Assimon. “Nature gives life, it’s the beginning of everything.”
The Foundation necklace, with its double cascade of graduated diamonds leading to fancy deep grayish yellowish green diamonds, nods to the power of flowing sap, while the Interlace designs figure roots curling around each other.
These were plentiful, with colorful rough shapes catching the light on the Embrace bracelet in hues of delicate gray, greens and tawny browns that contrasted with faceted white diamonds, the largest one accented by polished natural jet, another rarity of nature.
While January is a more subdued period for the high jewelry sector in terms of staged presentations, it is all about planting seeds — in the minds of clients.
“Clients come in the first chapter to get an understanding of where we are going, so the three sets give an indication of what’s to come in July,” said Assimon.
“By showcasing them during haute couture week, we not only highlight Bulgari’s exceptional craftsmanship but also offer a glimpse into the evolution of our high jewelry creations, bridging the timeless legacy of Aeterna, our latest collection presented to celebrate our 140th anniversary, with what’s to come,” said the Roman jeweler’s creative director Lucia Silvestri.
With the Luminosa Coral suite, she nodded to this idea of time-defying continuity through a design inspired by coral reefs, where each organism is harmoniously connected to its peers. Nature’s perpetual cycle also informed the Infinite Blossom necklace, a rose gold creation featuring over 23 carats of rubellites, almost 30 carats of peridots as well as amethysts, diamonds and mother-of-pearl elements galore.
For these first designs of the year, “the role of color has been paramount,” she told WWD. “Color for us is not merely an aesthetic choice, but an essential part of our identity.”
The Call of the Wild
Nature came untamed and prolific at Boucheron, where creative director Claire Choisne presented her annual “Histoire de Style” collection riffing off the house archive.
Alighting on Frédéric Boucheron’s naturalistic approach — “consider this a collaboration with him,” quipped his successor — she harvested fields and vegetable patches for carrot flowers, fuchsia buds, laurel, ivy and roses galore for “Untamed Nature.”
It took no less than 3,600 hours to craft the lingonberry corsage train, which can be split into several smaller jewels when not worn draped across the shoulder and neck. A more graphic direction emerged with brooches modeled after a reed or a pair of stems with delicately moving panicles that were threaded in a model’s hair for the presentation.
Elsewhere, a delicately outlined thistle leaf highlighted one of the collection’s throughlines, which was to “work in the old-fashioned way, using only the minimum amount of gold” to fully transcribe the delicacy of the subjects, as Choisne explained.
Bumblebees and other insects were there too and had editors snapping away to capture the true-to-nature iridescence of their wings. Choisne explained they were slivers of mother-of-pearl thinned to near-transparency and paired with a similarly slim slice of rock crystal.
With the Bamboo high jewelry capsule, Chaumet expanded its repertoire as “the naturalist jeweler,” a signature coined by founder Marie-Étienne Nitot, with an abstract interpretation of bamboo.
A plant it had seldom explored — only a handful of sketches and a 1970s pen appear in the archive — the perennial evergreen inspired a near-abstract 10-piece lineup that included a tiara, important necklace, rings and brooches.
The natural movement of leaves and shoots was interpreted in the juxtaposition of textured yellow gold, diamond-set white gold and painterly dashes of blues and greens from opals and tsavorites.
Now on its final chapter, Cartier’s Nature Sauvage high jewelry collection pushed further the figurative fantasies that stage animals in imaginary locales and situations.
Panthers and other felines were well represented but there was also the bee, one of the first animals in the Cartier bestiairy. Among the designs drawing the eye was the Melis set, including the necklace worn by Zoe Saldaña at the Golden Globes in January.
The humble winged worker was figured as a 2.64-carat yellow diamond briolette but what really caught the eye was the ball-shaped cut given to more diamonds, resting in hexagonal settings that figured honeycombs ripe with honey.
For the Molinae set — that’s fuchsia’s scientific moniker, in case you’re not a keen gardener — there were 7 carats of kite-cut diamonds but it was the two that are given a tremblant setting on either side of the center stone that telegraphed the flower’s charming side. In the same vein, special mention to the moving paw on the tigers also shown at the Ritz.
Gleaming Gardens
Nature took a more manicured turned in “Dior Milly Dentelle,” where artistic director of Dior Joaillerie Victoire de Castellane married up the two loves of house founder Christian Dior — couture and gardens, themes she had explored separately.
In this 76-strong collection, which included 15 unique pieces, delicate gold laces were decorative in their own right but had been further illuminated with floral-inspired gem-set motifs. What struck was that unlike other collections, precious metal came to the fore.
Exemplifying this delicately organic direction were the blushing Dior Milly Dentelle necklace in rose gold. In addition to a striking 4.8-carat pink spinel, diamonds, rubies, mandarin garnet and pink sapphires were subtly enhanced by the use of white cultured pearls, and the collection’s ribbon-like choker where a yellow diamond of 7 carats was given pride of place in a backdrop of more diamonds, emeralds, yellow sapphires, orange spinels and tsavorites.
Elie Top marked his eponymous label’s 10th anniversary with a three-day exhibition at Christie’s that featured designs inspired by the gardens of the Age of Enlightenment, a period that he’s been fascinated with since he was a teen with a knack for sketching architecture.
Ever tongue-in-cheek, he titled his new designs “Liaisons Dangereuses,” (or dangerous liaisons, in English) after the lascivious dramas of French nobility in the eponymous 1782 epistolary novel.
“I was obsessed with the Stephen Frears version because it seemed to be, a bit like ‘Barry Lyndon,’ the best representation — minus the perverted antics — that we could have of the period in terms of its style, the salons, all those chandeliers, crystals, French gardens where everything is very balanced, very mastered,” he explained.
Early in the process he had gemstones as much as milestones on the mind, too. (Top also showcased jewels he reworked for clients from existing pieces elsewhere in the exhibition.)
“I wanted to use old mine cut diamonds, which are repurposed and have this brilliance and this hand-cut aspect that I find quite moving,” he told WWD. “That’s what also what gave me the desire go towards this period and aesthetic that I’d never explored creatively for myself.”
Birds of a Feather Flock Together
Capturing the delicate organic movement of feathers is at the heart of Chanel’s first high jewelry capsule of the year. A key theme from Gabrielle Chanel’s seminal “Bijoux de Diamants” collection, it was also a favorite of Patrice Leguéreau, the director of the house’s jewelry creation studio who passed away last year.
Having explored it in his first offering for Chanel in 2010, he continued with six new sets totaling 15 pieces that push further on suppleness thanks to a specific construction technique. One all-diamond set was revealed to clients only in Paris during couture, ahead of the full reveal in March.
Among coming designs were a transformable masterpiece necklace in platinum, white and rose gold set with diamonds and sapphires, including a pink cushion-cut specimen of over 5 carats.
Piaget offered an abstract flurry of feathers in rose gold, round sapphires and rubies in its continuation of the “Essence of Extraleganza” anniversary collection. The necklace, with its zip closure and 12-carat rubellite, was stunning.
Also worth seeing and trying on in the Swiss watchmaker and jeweler’s Place Vendôme apartment was a multicolored titanium bracelet meant to evoke a scarf tied around the wrist. Made from titanium and despite being set with a rainbow of more than 600 stones, it was as light as its inspiration.
Graff brought “The Gift of Love” to Paris, a masterpiece necklace capturing two sparrows in flight, one bearing a precious present: a pear-shaped fancy intense yellow diamond of 13.51 carats. That would already warrant a warm welcome, but the entire necklace featured more than 2,300 diamonds in pear, brilliant and baguette cuts in a white gold ribbon that frames the neck.
A Moment to Shine for Independents
Like any ecosystem, the momentary absence of larger players made space for independent jewelers and new jewelry saplings to soak up the limelight.
“January is a better moment to carve out a space and emerge, given that in June, all the big names of Place Vendôme bring out collections, often in exceptional locales,” said Rouvenat’s artistic director Sandrine de Laage.
The latest Bolt necklaces from the revived French house were worth making time for. One was the first fully paved take on the style, with a 2.89 carat old-cut diamond surrounded by another 6 carats of diamonds and drops of rock crystal, on a chain of rock crystal beads.
The second featured a nearly 6 carat Madagascar sapphire and was finished with a pompom of sapphire and emerald beads. Both were in the low-six-figure range in terms of price.
Behind these glittering gems was the idea of a more ethical — and traditional — jewelry path, where creations no longer fit to taste or purpose become part of new ones. “It’s a bit like the Fontainebleau castle, where no period was destroyed but became another layer in the construction and history of the place,” Top said.
Aiming for its jewelry practice to be gentle on the Earth and its denizens — the elephant inspired many of its jewels — three-year-old Mazarin blended its exploration of lab-grown stones as “a resource of our time” and the age-old ingenuity of human craft in the Nautilus high jewelry cocktail ring.
Curling around a 2.95-carat blue rose-cut gem was a seashell cleverly constructed from a marquetry of jasper and “vegetable ivory,” the name given to the tagua nut for its resemblance to the material of animal origin.
Brazilian designer Cris Porto brought the meanders of the Amazon River, the crystalline waters of the Maldives — and dozens of hues of tourmalines, the star product from her home state of Minas Gerais. Among the stars was the Lili set, featuring aquamarines including a 57-carat one as centerpiece on a necklace. She will be back in Paris to mark the 40th anniversary of her label with a bigger splash later in the spring.
Dipping its toe into the presentations in Paris for the first time was Gemmyo, who presented a high jewelry take on its Entaille collection with a sizable pendant displayed at the Ritz, featuring a 2.3-carat green tourmaline from Namibia amid snow-set diamonds.
“Place Vendôme jewelers have been doing high jewelry very well for more than a century so let’s not copy them,” said the brand’s cofounder Pauline Laigneau. “I wanted to invent the Gemmyo way, a jewel that’s resolutely wearable, comfortable even for such a piece, with a real search for ‘value for money’ in this category and highlighting a magnificent but lesser-known stone.”
Launch Gallery: High Jewelry Highlights from January's Couture Week in Paris
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