MASTER PIECES
The jewellery world is abuzz with the recent unveiling of this year’s haute joaillerie offerings, ranging from celestial-inspired sparklers to intricate floral recreations
Each year, and often in conjunction with the haute couture shows in Paris, the world’s leading jewellery houses present the results of countless hours of design, gemstone sourcing and technically precise craftsmanship in the form of their haute joaillerie collections. Every piece in these carefully curated collections is a unique marvel of colour, detail and beauty. It may be a ring of rose gold and diamonds evoking the dazzling sun or a necklace of white gold and diamonds that can transform into a headpiece or pair of earrings. It may be a brooch with doors that open to reveal a garden of sapphires, garnets, emeralds and spinels, or a choker that boasts a massive sapphire on a web of white gold and diamonds. Whatever the case may be, these high-jewellery creations are nothing short of works of fine art. Here we present 11 of this year’s collections from brands such as Boucheron, Chaumet, Mikimoto and Piaget.
BOUCHERON
Boucheron’s Paris, Vu du 26 collection is not only a tribute to the city of light, but is also specifically a love letter to the beating heart of that city’s luxury retail industry, the globally renowned Place Vendôme, and in particular Boucheron’s original boutique there, at number 26. Under the magic wand of creative director Claire Choisne, the so-called acanthus columns that decorate numerous Parisian buildings have been transformed into the graceful, white-gold, diamond-paved, question mark-shaped Feuilles d’Acanthe necklace, in a tribute to the city’s distinctive architectural style. The Verrière necklace, meanwhile, takes its inspiration from one of
Paris’s most instantly recognisable buildings, the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées, with an interior made from titanium plants which are each painstakingly added by hand. Choisne also pays tribute to Frédéric Boucheron’s creative spirit with the innovative use of three-dimensional marquetry combining onyx, rock crystal and white agate, as on a pair of pendant earrings set with emeralds and paved with diamonds accompanied by black lacquer. Also of note are a few additions to Boucheron’s muchdesired menagerie: the cat Wladimir as a cocktail ring, and Nuri, a large, colourful parrot, as an ear cuff.
CARTIER
Minerals, metal, light and colours come together in a swirl of visual poetry in Magnitude, Cartier’s latest high-jewellery collection, the first part of which was unveiled in June. Cartier has been famed for its pioneering use of brightly coloured semi-precious stones for more than a century, and the 69-piece collection, born in the imaginations of Jacqueline Karachi-Langane and her team at the maison’s High Jewellery Creation Studio, puts ornamental hard stones such as quartz, rock crystal, lapis lazuli and opal centre stage, with precious stones taking a supporting role, for a series of dazzling contrasts in colour, texture and shine. Standout pieces from the collection include the striking Zemia bracelet in white gold, which features a 77.27-carat Australian matrix opal at the centre of a riot of variously coloured sapphires, spessartite garnets and diamonds; the Équinoxe necklace, which depicts a nebula of blue lapis lazuli planets and moons, and a constellation of yellow, orange and white diamond stars, around the unheated 15.48-carat yellow Ceylon sapphire that sits at its centre; and the Thêia necklace in platinum, which comes set with seven round Colombian emeralds totalling 46.09 carats, along with carved rock crystals, onyx, black lacquer and brilliant-cut diamonds.
CHANEL
The new Le Paris Russe de Chanel collection is an ode to a chapter in Coco Chanel’s life when Russia inspired her and her work, even though she never set foot in the country.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, many members of the country’s Imperial Court fled to Paris, where the districts in which they congregated became known as Le Paris Russe, or Russian Paris. Chanel fell in love with all things Russian, and with one Russian in particular: Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, with whom she conducted a love affair. On the Folklore cuff, the Russian influence makes itself felt in a baroque, folksy form, with deep-ruby terracotta enamel forming the backdrop for camellia-shaped diamond petals, alongside colourful spinels, sapphires, tsavorites and cultured pearls. The Sarafane necklaces, meanwhile, are inspired by Russian needlework: one openworked necklace showcases an exquisite diamond weighing
10.18 carats, surrounded by no fewer than
1,347 diamonds as well as 10 cultured pearls; while another, etched with camellias that resemble lace and set in white gold, cultured pearls and diamonds, doubles as a headpiece that resembles a kokoshnik, a traditional Russian headdress.
CHAUMET
The celestial world and its wild inhabitants have always inspired the most beautiful works of art. Parisian jewellery house Chaumet reached to the heavens for inspiration for its new high-jewellery collection, Les Ciels de Chaumet (Skies of Chaumet), extending a journey that has celebrated nature since the maison’s inception in 1780. Les Ciels de Chaumet features a range of brooches, body ornaments, necklaces, pendant earrings and watches, on which the maison experiments with new materials and techniques, grouped under the themes Les Caprices du Ciel (Capricious Sky), Les Couleurs du Ciel (Colours of the Sky), Les Fulgurances du
Ciel (Dazzling Sky) and Les Habitants du Ciel (Inhabitants of the Sky). A particularly noteworthy piece, the Soleil de Feu necklace, comes in white and rose gold, set with oval-cut, pear-shaped and round mandarin garnets; pear-shaped, cushion-cut, oval-cut, briolette-cut and round sapphires; ovalcut and round spinels; and pear-shaped, oval-cut and brilliant-cut diamonds. The Lueurs d’Orage ring, meanwhile, is in white gold set with pear-shaped and brilliant-cut diamonds. And the Passages necklace is in white and rose gold, set with opals, oval-cut and fancy-shaped multicolored Paraïba-type tourmalines, and brilliant-cut diamonds.
CHOPARD
Caroline Scheufele, co-president and artistic director of Chopard, has woven her magic once again for the maison’s annual
Red Carpet Collection. Only this time, instead of only paying tribute to its official partner, the Cannes International Film Festival, the 72-piece collection celebrates the universal theme of love. Scheufele drew from a wide range of inspirations, including plants, animals and art history as well as the people around her and the beauty of the surroundings, to create the pieces worn by celebrities who graced the Cannes red carpet. Each ring, brooch, bracelet, necklace and set of earrings showcases the expertise and talent of Chopard’s mains d’art. For example, and because declarations of love are often accompanied by flowers, the workshop produced a set of rings and earrings shaped like intricately detailed orchids, with petals paved in diamonds, amethysts and pink sapphires. Other pieces are more abstract, including a necklace of connecting circles of white gold and titanium set with tanzanites, tourmalines, diamonds and amethysts.
Also included are new pieces that meet the ethical criteria of Chopard’s Green Carpet Collection. Highlights include a necklace and earrings set made with Fairmined gold and responsibly sourced diamonds.
DIOR
Dior Joaillerie’s creative director Victoire de Castellane has developed a unique style while still managing to capture the essence of the fashion house. For the 20th anniversary of Dior Joaillerie, which she has helmed since its inception, de Castellane designed a 99-piece collection, the jewellery house’s largest to date, that focuses on stones and cuts. Daring asymmetry and clashing colours are at the heart of the Gem Dior collection, combining a colourful spectrum of stones such as diamonds, emeralds and rubies as well as unusual cobalt blue spinels, cyan tourmalines and purple garnets in a variety of cuts to create unusual clusters that recall crystal-like formations. Several rings, according to de Castellane, resemble “a little packet of stones that has been placed on the finger. They topple over one another and wedge together to create effects of volume and relief just like geological strata or certain minerals such as pyrite, which have very geometric constructions”. The pieces are given names that are evocative of their predominant colour – daffodil, icicle, lime, poppy and raspberry – each one a declaration of love to stones, in turn geometric or organic, and always asymmetrical in design and use of colour.
LOUIS VUITTON
Francesca Amfitheatrof ’s debut highjewellery collection for Louis Vuitton pays homage to female medieval heroes and their will to forge their own destiny. The new artistic director for jewellery and watches drew on the aesthetic of knights’ armour, swords and heraldic crests to create a luminous collection notable for its architectural lines, sensual loops and spectacular gemstones. The star piece of the Riders of the Knights collection is an incredibly subtle choker, the Royaume. Shaped like a gorget – the armour piece designed to protect the throat – the imposing choker is exquisitely rendered as a mesh
“woven” with 1,600 diamonds, a true technical feast, with a 19.31-carat royal blue sapphire as its centrepiece. Elsewhere, the Reine necklace combines 153 carats of dazzling aquamarines mounted on a pavé chain set with 24 carats of diamonds to be worn as a single row choker, while the Cavalière necklace showcases spinels, a deep red gem that symbolises ardour and courage, cut here to contrast with diamonds. Other carefully selected stones, including aquamarines and lapis lazuli, evoke “the magnificence of dynastic jewels and sovereign power” and are intended to express the radiance of the woman who wears them.
MIKIMOTO
With its Place Vendôme boutique transformed into a magical white garden through an intricate paper installation, Japanese jeweller Mikimoto presented its Jardin Mystérieux collection, which references the secret gardens of European stately homes. While pearls remain the undisputed stars of the collection, be they luscious Akoya cultured pearls or rare pink conch pearls, Mikimoto jewellery designer Noriko Ota also incorporated fine coloured stones such as peridots, tourmalines, garnets, spinels, emeralds and sapphires to create a collection of 40 baroque pieces, including many brooches. The jeweller displayed intricate craftsmanship, for example, depicting a wrought iron gate with tiny diamonds on a brooch or with the use of a plique-à-jour technique (vitreous enamelling applied in cells without backing) to create a luminescent green foliage on another brooch.
Several whimsical pieces tell their own story, such as three sapphire doves flying above a cobbled yard of diamonds in the direction of a mimosa tree in full bloom, or a majestic swan (its body created by an oddly shaped pearl) gliding over water with marquise-shaped diamonds subtly evoking ripples. Together the collection is meant to evoke the anticipation of uncovering the mysteries of a secret garden.
PIAGET
Long inspired by nature’s majestic beauty throughout its more than 140-year history, Piaget dedicates this year’s high-jewellery collection to the “mysterious curves of a breathtaking desert landscape”. Golden Oasis comprises three sub-collections – Play of Lights, Desert Minerals and Native Bloom – with dazzling gold and gemstone-encrusted pieces. Play of Lights captures the infinite desert sky in all its glory, whether the sun at its peak or the stars at night. The Golden Hour necklace alone required 450 hours of work to set the 6.63-carat fancy vivid yellow diamond amid an array of warm yellow and pure white diamonds. It also took the maison’s gemmologist one year to gather the diamonds for the complete Golden Hour set that also features a statement ring and dangling earrings. Other highlights include the Luxuriant Oasis set from the Native Bloom collection with its rows of intensely hued emeralds placed along curved lines that echo a winding river, and the Blue Waterfall watch from the Desert Minerals collection that features marquise-cut sapphires on a bezel surrounding a white mother-of-pearl dial. The bracelet of the watch is engraved using the Palace Dior technique, a signature of the maison that involves manually engraving the metal and tightly assembled links.
TIFFANY & CO.
Described as “a study in virtuosity that showcases the earth’s most beautiful gemstones”, the 2019 Blue
Book Collection puts the jewellery house’s innovative craftsmanship on full display. Included in the Tiffany
Jewel Box are 11 brooches inspired by nature and housed in unique vessels, such as a dragonfly taking flight from a sterling silver envelope and a jewelled butterfly captured in a glass jar. “We wanted to create a collection that speaks to connoisseurs of the unusual and unexpected, to people who are looking for something they’ve never seen or worn before,” explains Reed Krakoff, chief artistic officer.
The collection is divided into chapters, including Flora, Frame, Icons, Mosaic, Sculpture, Ribbon and Flight, with intricately detailed pieces recalling birds, insects and beetles or geometric shapes and repeating design elements. Gemstones, meanwhile, cover the spectrum with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, black opals and many more. “The collection celebrates our passion for discovering and introducing rare gemstones,” Krakoff says, “presenting them in unique designs that are both masterfully crafted and very modern in their sensibility and attitude.”
VAN CLEEF & ARPELS
For its high-jewellery launch, Van Cleef & Arpels transported visitors to a garden in Verona, the romantic Italian city at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragic love story,
Romeo and Juliet. The main actors of this presentation were the 100 or so dazzling pieces that surprised with their abstraction and hypnotically large stones. The collection itself found inspiration in Verona’s medieval architecture, its castellated ramparts transformed into the dazzling articulated Merli bracelet using a mystery set ruby technique; its winding alleys and bridges over the Adige river suggested by a stream of sapphires and diamonds in the transformable
Verona necklace; and its verdant gardens brought to life in Giardino, a transformable necklace composed of sapphire and emerald beads. “For us, the choice of Romeo and Juliet was a natural one for several reasons.
Literature is one of the maison’s major sources of inspiration, and when [renowned choreographer and dancer] Benjamin Millepied told us that he was working on a contemporary adaptation of the play, it struck me as a remarkable opportunity,” says CEO and artistic director Nicolas Bos. “This masterpiece acts as the starting point for a dialogue between disciplines involving high jewellery, dance, music and the visual arts.”