Heaven sent
Van Cleef & Arpels’ latest high jewellery collection is a love affair with the cosmos.
Astronomy has long been a powerful influence on design and Van Cleef & Arpels has been observing the poetry of the skies and constellations for more than 100 years. Its latest high jewellery collection, Sous les Étoiles, is a love affair with the ephemeral and scientific perception of the cosmos, writes Alison Veness.
Planets, a golden sun, the moon’s surface, a shower of meteorites and inky midnight skies have all played a part in the rich history of Van Cleef & Arpels since the French jewellery company was founded in Paris in 1896. Now with the release this year of Sous les Étoiles, images from deep space of the cosmos are the inspiration and subject of 120 intricate and incredible one-off high jewellery pieces.
Nicolas Bos, CEO and president of Van Cleef & Arpels, instrumental in the creative direction of the maison, says that the idea of space and astronomy is part of the heritage and “has always resonated because it is really something we find in old forms of expressions, to the beginning of mankind. Probably, when we think of this current year, given what has been going on, it was quite a good time to look up and to try to think about something else …”
The new collection is a considerable distraction, a puzzle of precious gemstones including the mesmerising Saturne clip, inspired by the second greatest mass in the solar system with its ochre colour in hammered yellow gold and gravitating rings of diamonds. Halley’s Comet (which last appeared in the inner solar system in 1986), too, is realised, in this instance as a breathtaking necklace designed to create a sparkling impression of movement with the clever placement of contrasting white and yellow diamonds, the head of the comet a fancy vivid yellow diamond weighing 11.29 carats.
The Trésor Astral necklace, with its two octagonal-cut sapphires – one from Sri Lanka weighing 31.17 carats, the other from Myanmar weighing 22.82 carats – is inspired by two stars, Alcor and Mizar, both visible to the naked eye in the Great Bear constellation. It’s clever and dazzling.
It is clear that the Van Cleef & Arpels’s design studio and workshop have had both challenges and fun creating this collection of celestial wonders, such is the spatial breadth, fiery depth and exquisite sourcing of the gemstones inspired by astronomical photographs.
The design studio worked with Isabelle Grenier, a highly regarded astrophysicist who added her expertise surrounding the scientific phenomenon that helped create these iconic pieces.
Bos says that when Grenier, a university teacher who works with NASA, first looked at the finished collection with her scientist’s eye, she saw more synergy than even the jewellery house did initially. “On top of that, a lot of the precious stones and a combination of chemicals actually come from space,” says Bos. “When you think of certain precious stones, they actually exist on other planets and galaxies. For us it was to interpret a feeling, but she said we find exactly these materials, probably the same colour, but billions of light years away. With these jewels she found we are giving a threedimensional version at a human scale you can hold in one hand.
I think she liked that – realistic enough but poetic enough so the idea is not to create a scientific object but to create an emotion and a feeling. She was quite moved by the pieces.”
The design studio also referenced literature from the work of Jules Verne, the 19th-century author whose novels inspired the maison’s high jewellery collection Les Voyages Extraordinaires 10 years ago, to classical author Lucian of Samosata’s imagining of a journey into space and Camille Flammarion’s 1880 book Popular Astronomy.
Since Bos first arrived at Van Cleef & Arpels in 2000 [becoming CEO and president in 2013], he has long encouraged deep research into important cultural works including poetry, art and writing. “Jewellers, for centuries, have been featuring shooting stars and constellations through diamonds, because that’s probably the most accurate rendering you can get on Earth of the luminosity and brilliance of the star,” he says. “There is this old inspiration … literature and poetry, and we’ve been with the team and the designers reading a lot of these books, especially on renaissance or 19th century where there is almost this half-scientific but halfimaginary vision of the skies.”
Both the phenomenal Temple Lapis ring (pictured opposite page, left) with its central lapis lazuli stone surrounded by rose gold, rubies and diamonds, and the Temple Fossilized wood ring (opposite page, right) with a core of fossilised wood supported by yellow gold, spessartite garnets and diamonds, take inspiration from the Earth’s magnetic field and also, Bos says, something spiritual or sacred. “The idea of something holy but not necessarily religious,” he explains, adding that the materials such as the ornamental stones and petrified wood aren’t used frequently by the jeweller. “[Instead] it was about capturing this explosion of colours and really matching some of the images we were looking at,” he details. “If we think of the lapis lazuli by itself it is a night sky, and because there are these dots of pyrite that shine in the dark blue – this is why I wanted to include these materials.”
Under the careful and nurturing guidance of Bos through education, knowledge and with a respect for fantasy and otherworldly possibilities, each piece of high jewellery – from the raw materials through to rough stone and polished perfection – keeps Van Cleef & Arpels at the very top of intuitive and expert craftsmanship.
They may be heavenly dreams but they are based in a tangible reality, and now that the collection is complete, Bos says: “I feel reassured … the sky being this frightening endless universe is something a bit closer and a bit warmer. I feel more comfortable in a way, because of the diversity and the multiplicity of beauty that we find there, which is much more than I originally thought, and that creates some kind of proximity. So it was a good way for us to better connect with the universe above us.”
“When we think of this current year, given what has been going on, it was quite a good time to look up and to try to think about something else”