Ring the changes
When it comes to the way we wear jewellery, Louis Vuitton’s Francesca Amfitheatrof says women are rewriting the rules
FRANCESCA AMFITHEATROF IS A LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE rock star in the world of fashion. Her gift for turning gemstones and precious metals into works of art has earned her a series of sparkling creative roles that has led to her current position as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton Watches and Jewellery. Her fan club spans far and wide, encompassing influential editors, retailers and celebrities including Ana de Armas and Alicia Vikander, and her cool factor remains as high as ever, untarnished by navigating years and years of vibe shifts. Most notably, she’s changing the way women buy and wear jewellery at a time when the idea of self-gifting expensive pieces has become as buzzy a post-pandemic topic as self-care.
But before all this, Amfitheatrof was a small girl lying on her grandmother’s lap, staring at a dragonfly suspended in an amber pendant while her grandfather played the piano. ‘She’d stroke my forehead, which is one of my first memories of tenderness that I have as a kid,’ she recalls. ‘And she had a gold chain with a big piece of amber that would just float above my head. I would look at this insect inside the amber and think, “Wow, there is a whole world in there.’”
For Amfitheatrof, jewellery was a sensory and emotional experience from the beginning – one that she says is about sound and touch. ‘Italians like to wear a lot of jewellery and a lot of gold,’ she says. (Her mother is Italian, while her father, a former bureau chief for Time magazine, is American.) ‘So it’s culturally embedded in [me] to have this interest in jewellery and how intimate it is to your personality. Jewellery doesn’t really follow fashion. It’s something that follows the person,’ she says.
We’re sitting and drinking cold-pressed green juice outside a showroom that contains her glittering new collection, Spirit Chapter II, within the sprawling mothership of Maison Louis Vuitton at Place Vendôme in Paris. ‘I always say that jewellery has to be sensual, and people don’t quite understand what I’m talking about. But it’s true: it has to meet with the body,’ she says, in a surprisingly British accent. (Amfitheatrof has lived in England, Japan, Russia, Italy and the United States, where she’s currently based. ‘Because I grew up all over the world, I never knew where I wanted to live,’ she says.)
After swerving her father’s Harvard aspirations for her, she attended Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London. In the course of her studies Amfitheatrof became a part of a now-legendary friendship group that included Alexander McQueen and Damien Hirst; Jay Jopling of White Cube put on her first gallery show. ‘At the time it was very anti-establishment. You know, Margaret Thatcher was still going strong. One era was ending in Britain and another one beginning,’ she says. Big jobs followed, including a stint as the first female artistic director of Tiffany & Co.
Now, she’s designing through yet another period of transition. There’s been much discussion in recent years about how the power dynamics around jewellery are shifting. Generations ago, a sapphire necklace might have been a trophy a husband would buy to admire on his wife, whom he might have viewed as a trophy of a different kind. These days, women are increasingly purchasing pieces for themselves, just as they would a handbag or shoes. The idea of waiting for a romantic partner to buy a ring feels outdated. ‘There are a lot of women now who are very successful, who know what they want and choose for themselves. They don’t have to wait to be given, you know, “the set”,’ says Amfitheatrof.
Walking me through her collection, she describes how she likes to mix gold and white metals to create a sense of warmth. She wears her own jewellery with a casual ease. ‘These are different wedding bands,’ she explains, showing me a series of delicate stacked rings on her fingers. ‘That one was my grandmother’s.’ On her ears, small star-shaped diamonds match the low-key vibe of her relaxed black jumpsuit. Amfitheatrof says her lived experience as a woman has resulted in a different approach to design: ‘I do believe we’ve been living in an archival decade, and it’s sort of boring. But I think [in this collection] we have this fabulous approach that is very in tune with the way women are thinking today,’ she says. ‘I feel like women are looking for more meaning in what they wear. These pieces are going to last a lot longer than any of us. So they have to have a certain power in the space in which they exist.’