Andrew Coxon, president of the De Beers Institute of Diamonds
founded in 2005, to its position as one of the most formidable forces in the fine jewellery world. Last year, the house turned over €100m – two years ahead of forecasts – and today it is stocked in over 400 locations worldwide. There are plans to open boutiques in London, Doha, LA and more over the next 12 months.
Valérie has diamonds in her DNA. Her father, André Messika, is one of France’s most successful diamond merchants. ‘He has a diamond addiction!’ she laughs. ‘ When I was younger, I understood very quickly that if I wanted to capture the attention of my father, it was easier if I was in his world.’ So, while the rest of us were dressing up and messing around with dolls, Valérie was playing with diamonds, which were ‘everywhere’.
When she decided to follow her dad into the diamond industry in her early twenties, Valérie already knew she didn’t want to produce heavy pieces – big rocks that were weighed down with formality and status. ‘I found the diamond industry quite boring and diamonds so dramatic,’ she says, lamenting the idea that, ‘ You had to wear or buy them for a “big” occasion.’
Instead, Valérie made it her mission to give women diamonds for everyday. She recognised that having an appreciation for luxury doesn’t have to equate to ostentatious gestures of wealth. Just in the same way we might want to wear, say, a super-soft cashmere sweater or a bespoke tuxedo jacket, Valérie understood that, ‘ You don’t have to show how much money you have just because you’re wearing diamonds.’
So, Messika has made its name with light, discreet, but innovative designs such as the Move collection, which has three mobile diamonds in each piece and is the brand’s best-seller. Styles are executed with impressive lightness, such as the Skinny bracelet (made using clever technology for flexibility, so that it sticks close to the body ‘like a tattoo’), which Valérie wears everywhere, every day: to work, on the beach, to the gym and, yes, even on the back of a motorbike.
Valérie’s relaxed attitude to diamonds has encouraged her to try out experimental styles, too: ear cuffs, hand bracelets, triple rings. By being unafraid to play with trends (she says she often sees her competitors as shoe and bag brands, rather than other fine jewellery houses), Valérie has positioned Messika at the forefront of luxury for the Instagram generation. ‘I think our success is to have captured this younger generation and make them interested in diamonds,’ she says, adding that she enjoys seeing the ‘punky’ way girls have of wearing precious stones – something that’s been epitomised by her ongoing, and wildly successful, collaboration with model Gigi Hadid.
All that’s not to say Valérie can’t do show-stopping. Beyoncé is a fan and, earlier this year, chose to wear the Persian Drops set – featuring more than 100 carats of white diamonds – for her Apeshit video, filmed in the Louvre. But Beyoncé wears Messika off-duty too, albeit in her version of dress-down: this summer she was seen holidaying in the South of France in a huge pair of bespoke diamond hoops with her name spelled out in the middle, worn with denim cut-offs and a tour tee. It was the ultimate high/low ‘I will not be intimidated by luxury’ move. In other words, what Messika is all about.
‘For me, luxury doesn’t mean sophisticated,’ says Valérie. ‘It means reflecting something about your soul, your spirit, your style.’
‘Luxury doesn’t mean sophisticated, it’s about reflecting your soul, your style’
when andrew coxon was a teenager at boarding school in the Channel Islands, he would spend his summers in Rio de Janeiro, where his father was the Naval and Air Attaché at the British Embassy. Days were spent surfing and hanging out at the jewellery shop beneath their apartment block, where he was entrusted with stopping his mother – a good-looking, glamorous woman with ‘flashing eyes’, a zest for life and a taste for sparkly things – from buying jewellery. To distract him from that task, the shop owner (who, understandably, enjoyed the business) would let the young Andrew rummage through the latest sacks of aquamarines and tourmalines.
Eventually, his love for jewels outweighed his love for surfing. A budding entrepreneur, Andrew decided to sell his surfboard, buy gemstones with the money, and sell them on to a jeweller in Jersey – a process he repeated trip after trip. Each time the jeweller told him, ‘ You’re good at this,’ and encouraged the teenage Andrew to apply to De Beers as a trainee diamond buyer, saying, ‘And then you can come back and work with me and live in Rio with your girlfriend and live happily ever after.’
Fast-forward 50 years and, while he might not have gone off into the Copacabana Beach sunset, Andrew has had his happily ever after with De Beers and diamonds. His career has taken him all over the world – from sorting rough diamonds in London to buying stones in far-flung corners of the globe and setting up a diamond-buying office in Antwerp. Today, as president of the De Beers Institute of Diamonds, the debonair 69-year-old is, he says, ‘responsible for setting the diamond standard for every diamond that’s selected for De Beers’.
There’s something of the adventurer to Andrew, who has sourced some of the world’s most spectacular diamonds, such as the 203.04-carat Millennium Star, which was the centrepiece of the Millennium Dome’s 2000 celebrations, and the 59.60-carat Pink Star diamond, which sold at auction for a record-breaking $71.2m last year. He says that, today, the diamond market is akin to the contemporary art world in its money-no-object one- upmanship. ‘ You can’t increase the supply of diamonds, but the number of people buying them has increased. So the really rare ones have taken on a life of their own.’ He adds, ‘All my mistakes have been diamonds that were rare and beautiful but more expensive than I thought De Beers should pay. They all look cheap now.’
But the unfathomable price tags tell only half the story. For Andrew, diamonds are incomparably romantic, mystical even, and today he still speaks about them with all the starry-eyed affection of a love-struck teenager. ‘It’s more powerful than we are – you can’t resist the sparkle of a diamond. It’s very intense,’ he says, clearly delighting in watching the team ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over the pieces he unveils on our shoot. ‘At De Beers we understand that there’s a point where science and poetry meet – and that’s beauty.’
Certainly, Andrew is not immune to their charms. When it comes to buying diamonds, he thought he had perfected a poker face and ‘ice cool’ demeanour over years in the business. ‘But then my wife told me, “It’s all a waste of time because the De Beers diamonds make your eyes sparkle,”’ he laughs. ‘ When I come home she says, “You’ve either been looking at diamonds today or you met somebody on the Tube – which is it?’’’
Indeed, for Andrew, the allure of diamonds goes beyond technical categorisation. ‘ The misconception is that two diamonds with the same four Cs [carat, cut, colour and clarity] and same paperwork have the same value or beauty,’ he says. ‘ The paperwork is important to have, but the four Cs are silent on the subject of beauty and that’s where De Beers focuses most attention.’ The real luxury of diamonds, he says, is in the experience of choosing one. ‘Seeing somebody come to the store, trying on De Beers diamonds and finding the diamond that they never want to let go – that’s a really luxurious experience.’
So how should one choose a diamond? ‘It’s just like choosing your partner for life – it’s very romantic and very strong. And if you force yourself not to choose that one and keep looking, you’ll never forget it. It’s just like that person you didn’t marry – you regret it the rest of your life,’ he says. ‘Once you fall in love with the diamond, it becomes extremely powerful, forever.’
‘Once you fall in love with a diamond, it becomes extremely powerful, forever’