BRIGHT FUTURE
Tiffany’s first female design director on her vibrant high-jewellery collection for the modern woman
Lydia Slater discusses colour and modernity with Tiffany’s first female design director, Francesca Amfitheatrof
With practised ease, Francesca Amfitheatrof clasps a fluid, multi-stranded diamond collar around her neck and turns round to show me. The combination of her dark-eyed, gamine beauty and the dramatic jewellery evokes instant déjà vu: it’s that iconic image from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The resemblance seems entirely appropriate, for Amfitheatrof has been Tiffany & Co’s design director since 2013, and her Holly Golightly-esque obsession goes back much further. As a child, she says she was mesmerised by a glamorous book her mother owned on Tiffany table settings; later, while studying jewellery design at Central Saint Martins, she informed her careers advisor of her ambition to work there. ‘Elsa Peretti was my god,’ she says of the designer who spent nearly 40 years there creating some of its bestloved pieces – such as the Open Heart necklace and the bone cuff. ‘I’ve always loved Tiffany,’ says Amfitheatrof.
Having started out designing for its rivals, including Chanel,
‘I want to bring colour into Tiffany. If you’re wearing that, then I want
to sit next to you at dinner!’
Fendi and Garrard, Amfitheatrof has wasted no time in bringing her own elegant and colourful aesthetic to the brand. Before she even arrived, she created her Tiffany T collection, a range of minimalist necklaces, bracelets, cuffs and rings with a motif as instantly recognisable as anything Peretti produced.
Today, we are viewing her new high-jewellery Masterpieces Collection for 2016; the value of the precious stones sparkling from their velvet beds is incalculable. No wonder the security guards look on apprehensively as Amfitheatrof casually suspends diamonds off herself and me, until we both resemble twinkling Christmas trees. Her approach to both designing and wearing jewellery, even important pieces like these, is one of joyous informality. A key inspiration, she tells me, was the ribbon. ‘I wanted pieces that were flippy, with a soft drape, so they could be worn with jeans,’ she explains. ‘That’s light, chic, elegant, modern.’ So a South Sea black pearl and mixed-cut diamond necklace is artfully constructed to look tangled; a cuff of diamonds and rubellites set so that when looked at one way, the bracelet glitters a dazzling white, but when viewed from a different direction is flamingo-pink.
She clips this around her wrist, where it nestles next to some wooden beads and a gold and diamond Tiffany T bracelet; she is dressed with similarly exotic vibrancy in trousers adorned with parrots and pineapples and a tiger-striped T-shirt. ‘I love clashing patterns,’ she says. ‘I want to bring colour into Tiffany.’ It is there in full measure in the accompanying Prism collection – ‘my disco balls’, she says playfully. Spheres set with carefully graduated pink, blue or yellow sapphires, tsavorites and spessartites hang from gem-set chains; pink sapphires and diamonds cluster with a huge golden pearl atop a Borgia-like ring. ‘If you’re wearing that, then I want to sit next to you at dinner!’ she says, laughing. ‘Of course, we’re always going to use incredible diamonds and the best craftsmanship, but I think there’s a real craving for fun jewellery.’
The first female design director in Tiffany’s history, Amfitheatrof knows what it is like to wear her creations. She dislikes what she terms ‘butler pieces’ – jewellery so heavy, so stiff or complicated that it has to be hung on the wearer by another person. ‘Jewellery is quite a male world,’ she says. ‘It’s very different when a woman designs it. I’m obsessed with how things sit and feel on the skin; I’m always thinking about weight, and how to put things on and take them off.’ This approach makes perfect sense in an era when, increasingly, women are buying their own jewellery rather than waiting to be given it by a man; today’s Holly Golightly is no longer standing on Fifth Avenue, wistfully looking through the window…