This summer began with a plethora of glamorous trips and presentations, in which the world’s leading houses showcased their latest high jewellery collections, combining creativity, craftsmanship, not to mention the world’s rarest gems. The season’s apex came at Couture Week in Paris where, among the record-breaking diamonds and more classical designs, there were welcome tales of the unexpected in terms of materials, techniques, even how jewelry is worn and displayed.
Claire Choisne of Boucheron can always be relied on to elicit more gasps of wonder from weary editors than anyone else and this year she didn’t disappoint.
In a suitably dramatic presentation, guests were ushered into a dark room and Choisne’s vision of ‘Impermanence’ in the form of six precious ikebana (Japanese flower arrangements) were revealed one by one via spotlight. Each arrangement, created in a striking monochrome palette, can be displayed as precious sculpture or taken apart to be worn as individual jewels.
With a nod to founder Frédéric Boucheron’s 19th century vision, Choisne drove to make the depiction of an iris flower, a pendant of wisteria, even a caterpillar, as lifelike as possible, only adding her own very personal message about the fleetingness of beauty in nature – and the damage done it to by human hands.
IMAGES COURTESY OF BOUCHERON
In the four years it took to make this ambitious collection, Boucheron’s R&D department had scoured unlikely places for the most suitable materials to bring Choisne’s vision to life. The translucent, paper-thin seed pods of an honesty plant were captured in diamonds and borosilicate glass, a material more usually found in chemistry labs. Plant-based resin, 3D printing and diamonds combined to create the spiky yet delicate heads of the thistle flower. The effect was high jewelry magic.
Naturalism too was the theme at Chaumet. With ‘Jewels by Nature’, the Parisian house paid homage to its forever muse, recreating flora and fauna in bold necklaces that incorporated some of the world’s largest and rarest gemstones.
The Wild Rose parure (matching set) was inspired by a 1922 tiara in Chaumet’s archives and centered on a gracefully curving necklace of plump diamond-set white gold buds and leaves, their whiteness providing a dramatic backdrop to the 8.23 carat Fancy Vivid yellow diamond at its center. More color came through in the transformable Water Lily necklace that starred a luscious deep-orange imperial topaz, skillfully combined with spinels in purple and pink.
IMAGES COURTESY OF CHAUMET
Elsewhere there was a retro 60s and 70s feel in the air. Graff tipped its hat to the year of its founding with ‘1963’, an Op Art-inspired set that married high precision craftsmanship with graduated, optical illusion-style oval rings of baguette-, brilliant- and oval-cut diamonds, all to hypnotic effect. Another surprise was in store when, from certain angles, one glimpsed a flash of Graff-green emerald pavé on the inner edge of each ring. It was a subtle effect but heightened the artfulness of the overall design.
IMAGES COURTESY OF GRAFF
Piaget meanwhile paid tribute to its artistic heritage and glory years of the 70s and 80s with ‘Shapes of Extraleganza’. A sculptural collar of curved slices of multi-colored ornamental stones, including turquoise, rhodochrosite and lapis lazuli, interspersed with half domes of gold and diamonds, embodied the colorful, postmodernist style of Memphis Design. The entire necklace centered on a pendant featuring a large pear-shaped diamond seductively surrounded by a halo of sapphires, malachite and diamonds.
London’s Jessica McCormack was also in Paris to show her everyday wearable version of high jewelry. An exceptional oval-cut emerald set on a blue sapphire rope chain and giant, mismatched button back diamonds swinging from gypset hoop earrings made the case that the best jewels are ones that feel effortless and sublimely sexy on the skin.
IMAGES COURTESY OF PIAGET (LEFT) AND JESSICA MCCORMACK (CENTER AND RIGHT)
For pure invention meanwhile, one needed to look no further than Athenian jeweler Nikos Koulis, who came to Couture with a sleek collection brimming with ideas.
Showing at Sotheby’s in Paris, Koulis transformed the ubiquitous gold chain necklace into a dazzling shower of diamonds, each link dissolving from an angular high-polish yellow gold top half to a white gold and diamond-set lower half. From this spilled a generous, dancing fringe of pear-shaped diamonds that play with light and add movement to the décolletage.
In a pair of striking earrings, deep-red oval-cut spinels were tilted to curve up the ear lobe, their shape echoed like ripples of water by three rings of gently tapering diamonds, one set in rigorously geometrical baguette cuts, the others in brilliant cuts. The addition of a trapezoid-shaped diamond off to the side of each spinel gave the design an added jolt of unexpected, contemporary energy.
IMAGES COURTESY OF NIKOS KOULIS
It’s hard to imagine many fashion and jewelry houses choosing to collaborate but the fruits of Gucci and Pomellato’s recent partnership should make them think again.
In ‘Monili’, the two Italian, Kering-owned houses put their heads together to create a perfectly surprising and perfectly wearable combination of diamonds and leather. The pieces, which comprise thick, sculptural ropes of pavé-set gold that are looped in turn with ones of stitched leather, include necklaces, bracelets and even minaudière bags. Together they engender the prêt à porter nonchalance of Italian luxury at its best, a refined casualness that only comes from having complete confidence in one’s own (and in this case, each other’s) superior craftsmanship, materials and DNA.
Inspired by Pomellato’s archival 1980s designs, the collaboration echoes a wider mood among discerning high jewelry clients: an admiration for exceptional craftsmanship and gemstones but, above all, for art that is wearable.
IMAGES COURTESY OF POMELLATO X GUCCI
Words by Rachel Garrahan, watch and jewelry author, editor and curator.
