WHAT’S COOL IN SCHOOL
In anticipation of the first international location of L’école, School of Jewellery Arts, at Hong Kong’s K11 Musea, Zaneta Cheng signs up for class at the Paris original
A day of classes at L’école, the jewellery arts school supported by Van Cleef & Arpels
It’s a chilly but sunny morning at L’école, the school of jewellery arts supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, on Rue Danielle Casanova just off Place Vendôme in Paris – perfect weather, my professors tell me, for the Wax Project And Setting Techniques class I’m taking, because the sun is crucial for all jewellery craftspeople. They should know as many of the professors who teach the Savoir Faire courses at L’école are Mains d’or (golden hands) from Van Cleef & Arpels’ own workshops – master jewellers and stone-setters who’ve spent their lives dedicated to the craft, and all of whose worktables face the atelier’s large windows.
As they demonstrate the traditional techniques, it becomes clear that jewellery setting and wax working is anything but simple. “You put your arm on the workbench,” says stone-setter Frédéric. “And you push the bead like this. When you push into the metal, keep the pressure and only once this is done, then can you set the stone. The goal is to push thousands and thousands of beads on the metal and you make a line.”
What he’s referring to is the indentation required for the pavé setting of stones, which involves a repetitive movement thousands of times over using the exact same pressure in order to create perfectly spaced, identical indents right across the metal block. Jewellery apprentices, we’re told, must master this first step before they’re allowed to move on to anything else. The slightest flaw means that the entire block must be discarded and the process begins all over again. Here, “no compromise” is the rigorous operating procedure and also the standard to which L’école operates.
Students who join in-depth Savoir Faire classes, one of the branches of jewellery study available at the school, can take Trying Out The Jeweller’s Techniques, From The
Wax Project To The Setting Techniques or From French Jewels To Japanese Lacquer, in which they’re able to try their hand at a particular facet of jewellery-making and create a Spirit of Beauty fairy, or take home their own hand-painted lacquer box.
L’école also provides gemology courses for those who want to learn how to distinguish precious stones, through classes such as Discover The Gemstones or Recognise The Gemstones. There’s even an introductory course for those who want to know how to pick the best possible engagement ring. These classes take students deep into the ways stones are currently cut and appreciated.
The school, however, also gives art-history classes for jewellery that range from Gold And Jewellery: From Antiquity To The Renaissance Princes, to A History of Jewellery, From Louis XIV To Art Deco. In the second half of our day’s instruction, Gislain Aucremanne brings out a dozen or so pieces from L’école’s own collection of historic jewellery. The oldest piece, a ring depicting flowers amid a bush, dates back to the 1600s and the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Aucremanne explains that because Louis wished to be known as the Sun King, everything in the land had to sparkle, hence the popularity of the diamond rose. At the same time, his predilection for the arts as a symbol of royal might enabled forms of artistic expression, such as elaborate French gardens providing bucolic inspiration, to flourish.
We see sentimental jewels born of the Romantic movement, in which birds of passion are a common motif, and others where locks of hair are integrated into the design. Why the hair? Because, we learn, people weren’t always able to marry the ones they loved, so they kept a discreet memento of their true love in a ring or pendant.
L’école keeps a library of books devoted to the art of jewellery-making and its history that is open to the public. It also funds an exhibition room at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs on the nearby Rue de Rivoli. The pieces in the exhibition are rotated frequently, but it’s only in the classes that we get to touch pieces from the 17th century, or peer through a loupe under Haussmannian windows that let in the white Parisian sunlight, which brings the stones’ magic to life.