From the front, the baguette-cut emerald earrings with pear-shaped emeralds on the end could be traditional pendant earrings as they have a very pure line. But from the side, the earrings look completely different with a large, black carbon fibre semi-circle giving them a more tribal vibe. This creative design by Fabio Salini is very much the synthesis of the Roman jeweller’s language: “to combine tradition with innovation. The carbon fibre adds a lot of strength to the piece and that is exactly what I want to express. You cannot be a contemporary designer without being innovative.”

 Salini notes that when Italian artist Lucio Fontana cut his canvases he revealed there was a world behind the canvas and says, “that’s what I want to express, when I set a stone backward, when you don’t see it from the front, I want to invite people to look behind the appearance.” As an example, the jeweller points out a pair of rubellite earrings, in which he incorporates a polished white gold mirror set perpendicularly to the stones to multiply their volume. 

“I want to approach jewellery design in an innovative way to go behind the appearance of stones and look deeper,” he muses, adding “I really want to make people understand that jewellery is a form of contemporary art, that the value is not necessarily in the stone, but in the design, research, manufacturing; there is so much work behind each piece.”

Having first trained as a geologist at the University of Rome specialising in emeralds, Salini honed his jewellery design knowledge while working for Cartier and Bulgari in the late 1980s-early ‘90s, before changing course completely and joining his family business in construction. “I think I would have regretted it if I didn’t join and it was actually a good thing (I did) because it really taught me to become entrepreneurial,” he recalls. During those years, Salini continued to create jewellery but just as a hobby, mainly for family and friends. However, after some of his creations were shown at the legendary jewellery boutique Petochi in 1999, and many of these pieces were bought by Queen Rania of Jordan, Salini decided to turn his hobby into a career.

From the start, Salini showed an interest in using unusual materials in his high jewellery pieces, such as rock crystal (now quite popular 20 years later), leather, silk, titanium, ceramics, oxidized copper, galucha (stingray), wood, resin and carbon fiber.

“I don’t really create collections. Each piece is unique and my creations have evolved through the introduction of different materials. My tastes change like the world around me. Creativity is an emotional process and of course emotionally you are influenced by what happens around you in the world, social and cultural movement,” he says.

He describes his jewellery as “contemporary classics” and points to his collaboration in 2013 with the celebrated Brazilian design duo, the Campana Brothers, pairing Brazilian bamboo and straw with gold and brown diamonds, “as a turning point” in his career.  

“That was for me the introduction to the contemporary art world and this collaboration taught me to look at my creations from a more conceptual perspective,” he says.

Salini is developing a more audacious design aesthetic. His latest interest focuses on carbon fiber as its lightweight nature offers greater freedom of scale, allowing him to become more sculptural in his approach.

Back in 2003, Nan Kempner, the grand-dame of New York society commissioned James Taffin de Givenchy to design two colourful rings. The French jeweller proceeded to create boule rings in white opal, one with a blue sapphire and the other with a pink ruby. “The colours against the white of the opal was really striking,” he recalls.

A few months later, Kempner called him. “James, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that I was at Valentino’s party and when the cake came in and I clapped, both rings chattered. The good news, everybody knows your name,” the French jeweller says with a laugh.

Taffin loves to experiment with materials and he’s had his fair share of “breakage” over the years. This may explain why the New York-based jeweller pioneered the use of hard wearing ceramics back in 2008, when he first created a collection for Sotheby’s Diamonds. Back then, the particular hard-wearing ceramic he favoured was primarily used in watchmaking and came in only three colours – black, white and pink.

While the jeweller first started using the material to coat the inside of gold rings, he has over the years and through trial and error refined the technique while also innovating with other colours.

“Today what you can do with ceramics is really limitless. It does (now) what a pavé surface would do 20 years ago, but it’s more modern, particularly when used with large stones,” he says. In some cases the jeweller uses ceramic as an elegant highlight to create a pop of colour that highlights a shape, in others the ceramic provides a dramatic foil to a large fine stone, reinforcing the stone’s colour.

After working at Christie’s and Verdura, the jewellery house of the legendary designer Fulco di Verdura, Taffin decided to open his by-appointment-only Salon Taffin Jewellery in 1996, focusing on one-of-a-kind jewellery pieces, often on a commission basis.

From the start, he wanted to experiment. “I had seen a lot of interesting creations at auction, and think that made a big difference in the way I approached jewellery. I always had an eye on history, but also wanted to make design more innovative and wearable.

While he’s become known for his ceramic creations, Taffin continues to experiment and innovate with various materials creating sculptural designs that highlight the individuality of the gemstones, inventively pairing them with rubber, steel, silk, wood and even pebbles.

“I like the beauty of imperfection; it’s that wabi-sabi Japanese concept. There is something beautiful about a brushed steel that seems to be not finished, contrasting with a perfect line of gold or a perfect cut stone. This is definitely what I’m interested in at the moment.”

In the eyes of some high-jewellery experts, the creations of Melanie Georgacopoulos can be considered almost blasphemous. From drilling holes in pearls to dicing them or slicing them in two, the Greek-born, Hamburg-based jeweller has been taking a radical approach to traditional pearl jewellery, and in the process, surprising her clients with unexpected, sculptural forms.

“The first time I discovered Melanie’s work it literally gave me goose bumps,” says Valery Demure, founder of personal shopping concept Objet d’Emotion, recalling Georgacopoulos’s Arlequin necklace, which features two perfectly matched halves of two different coloured pearls to create a chequered effect. “To me she is the punk queen of pearls!” Demure says.

Georgacopoulos’s highly unusual approach to pearls developed out of curiosity. While working on her graduation project at the Royal College of Art she picked up a fine jewellery saw and cut a pearl in half. “I had no idea what it looked like inside and I was just interested in the material,” she recalls.

“Because I had previously studied sculpture, I was able to cut pearls and facet them confidently, I wasn’t really worried about the value, thinking ‘this is expensive, I can’t cut it.’ I think if I had come from a purely jewellery background I wouldn’t have been so fearless with my approach. But I’ve always looked at pearls as a material rather than a symbol of status.”

Yet the young jeweller was also clear she would only cut pearls when it “made sense” to do so aesthetically, i.e. incorporating the natural growth rings of a pearl into the overall design. “I don’t just want to cut pearls as a provocation. I want to actually design something that totally makes sense,” she explains.

“It’s really about playing around with the notion of what is a pearl. It’s still a pearl, but it’s also something else, and I really like to play with that ambiguity,” she says.

The reaction to her first collection (in 2007) was mixed, as Georgacopoulos recalls, “Some people loved it, but some people also didn’t like what I had done and told me, ‘you can’t do that to pearls.’” While she sold many pieces, she took a job as a designer for a jewellery brand.

Three years after her first collection, interest was still coming in so she decided to dive into the world of pearls on her own and launched her eponymous brand in 2010. Her work was quickly picked up by trendy concept stores Colette in Paris and Dover Street in London and the following year she was approached by Japanese high-end jeweller TASAKI. This resulted in the launch of a joint brand M/G TASAKI in 2012, combining her creative, irreverent flair for design with the Japanese jeweller’s renowned craftsmanship.

In the last couple of years, Georgacopoulos has been repositioning her own brand to focus more on mother of pearl, saying it is “a much overlooked material in contemporary jewellery and I feel about this material the same than I felt about pearls.”

She notes, “For me it’s a natural evolution, as it’s a by-product of pearl farming. But at the same time it’s an extremely different material because you get it mostly flat.”

Once again taking the less travelled road, Georgacopoulos has been using a marquetry technique — usually used to inlay mother of pearl — to create mini-sculptures from the material that look like diamond-cut gemstones.

“As my work evolved I realized I’m extremely interested in the value that you bring to a jewellery piece through the craftsmanship, rather than the material value of the stone. At the end of the day, it’s just a stone, and I’m more interested in how you can elevate a material that no one talks about or cares about, like mother of pearl.”

She adds, “To me it’s also taking on a more sustainable approach. If you cultivate pearls, why not also use the oyster for something else, not just grind it.”

Enrico Castellani

In January 2011, Elisabetta Cipriani started corresponding with Enrico Castellani, the influential Italian artist, who as a member of the ZERO avant-garde group had focused his practice on materiality of painting, giving his monochrome surfaces a sculptural aspect. The London-based gallerist, who specializes in ‘wearable sculptures’, was determined to collaborate with one of Italy's most influential contemporary artists. 

“I started sending him regular letters and after two years, he invited me to come to his castle in Celleno. That’s how our relationship started, I would go there for lunches, we would talk, but nothing concrete ever happened. And then one day, he took two metal sheets, his hammer and a chisel and started to create what turned out to be the prototype for Superficie,” she says, recalling the creation of his limited edition of necklaces and bracelets.

“That moment, I will never forget. After such a long time, I was no longer expecting he would actually do it. I guess he came to see me as someone he could trust, someone who was really committed to having a project with him.”

Perseverance and her serious cajoling skills have been crucial to many projects Cipriani has pulled off since she first set up her gallery in 2009.

Ai Wei Wei’s Gold rings

“There are some artists I’ve been writing to for 10 years,” she says, “but I’m not giving up until they tell me ‘No.’ As long as they tell me they are busy, I’ll keep on trying. You have to be very persistent. I am working with artists, and they can’t be pressured, they can’t be hurried. I think that’s why I’m so attached to these projects. For me these pieces are like children.

Having first studied art history and briefly interned at Christie’s Old Masters department, Cipriani started her career as a curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO) in Rome, before moving to London in 2005 to work for Ben Brown Fine Arts, a high-end art gallery specializing in contemporary art. “I wanted to learn the business aspect of selling art, and this was a great place to do so,” she says. At the time, Ben Brown’s wife, Louisa Guinness, had a cabinet in his gallery for selling artist jewellery and Cipriani gradually took charge of bringing this to art fairs. “I felt that if I was going to sell these pieces, I needed to learn more about them, so I started to research and educate myself, and completely fell in love with the idea,” Cipriani recalls.

Cipriani discovered a world she knew little about and quickly fell in love. Artists like Alexander Calder, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Picasso, had all created artistic jewellery, but Cipriani was more interested in working with contemporary artists and set out to become the link between their vision and her goldsmith in Rome.

For her first collaboration in 2009 she reached out to Japanese installation artist Tatsuo Miyajima, whom she knew from her days at MACRO. Miyajima created the Time Ring, a large ring with an LED display that works as a counter with changing numbers representing the endless cycle of life with the wearer able to customize the speed of the counter to reflect their own feelings about the pace at which their life is flowing.

Looking back at the last 10 years, Cipriani identifies her collaboration with Ai Weiwei as one of the most memorable. The gallerist first met him in his studio in Northern Beijing in 2013 at a time when the artist was still under heavy surveillance. “I still remember there were all these cameras from the police on the street, It was strange because I was happy to meet him, but afraid at the same time,” she recalls.

While Cipriani managed to convince him on the spot to collaborate, it would take another two years before the artist would put in her hand Rebar in Gold, a piece of handcrafted 24 karat gold formed to resemble rebar, the steel reinforcing used in construction, which he had coiled to form a bracelet (a ring version is also available).

The jewellery was a continuation of Ai’s monumental installation Straight (2008-12), which the Chinese artist created out of the 200 tonnes of mangled pieces of rebar he collected after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that had resulted in nearly 70,000 deaths. The artwork was a commentary on the substandard building methods used for regional government building projects, in particular schools.

“It is about commemoration and memory,” Ai said at the time, “Whether your memory or the one I have, that’s up to you, so you mould the piece to suit you. I used gold because it’s precious and that’s what life is. If you wear this piece in the name of memory of a life lost or your life ahead, that’s what matters. It’s all about respect for life.”

Maria Sole Ferragamo

This year, Cipriani collaborated with him once again to create two new gold rings with Egyptian-looking hieroglyphics that are actually Ai’s interpretation of today’s human migration, with migrants’ stories unfolding under a mysterious half-moon.

“These rings fit perfectly within his usual practice, because his work always has a reference to the past, in this case the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but also expresses his concern about the human condition, the awareness of what it means to be trapped, and the freedom of travel,” Cipriani says.

Cipriani notes that when she started her business in 2009, it took a while to build interest, because the market was still relatively unknown. Today, Cipriani receives an enquiry about her pieces every day, and prices have soared, particularly for pieces designed or made by the most established artists.

“My clients are primarily art collectors who understand the value of the piece as an artwork. They don’t blink at the fact that there are no precious stones on a piece that costs €50,000,” she says.

To help clients start a collection and support less-established artists, Cipriani launched the EC Lab in 2018, where she invites young artists and designers to work on jewellery for the first time. “These are relatively cheaper pieces. It’s not only to help young artists get into the field of wearable art, but also for young collectors to start their collection,” she explains. Amongst the collaborations are Maria Sole Ferragamo’s architectural leather jewels made with left-over leather, and one between Flavie Audi, a French-Lebanese glass artist and jewellery designer Noor Fares mixing rock crystals and Murano glass.

This story was first published in ADORE magazine

Yooney Choi

Bringing their Asian sensibilities to the fore, either through the use of fabrics, colour or design inspiration, these four milliners create crowning glories that are turning heads around the world, writes Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop

The Flower Artist: Yooney Choi

Yooney Choi still remembers her first hat, it was yellow to match her kindergarten uniform: “I was a real little fashionista. Wearing hats in Korea is not very common, but my mum loved to match nice hats to my outfits.” As Choi grew older, she continued to wear hats but the difficulty finding a hat to complement her outfits perfectly led to her decision to make her own: “I’ve always thought that like icing on the cake, a hat completes an outfit.” 

The Seoul-based milliner loves unstructured curves and swirls of flowers and petals, and her hats often have a strong botanical feel. But she also brings a Korean sensitivity to her designs for example, looking for inspiration in traditional Korean hat shapes — such as the ‘Gat,’  a cylindrical black hat with a wide brim made of horsehair on a bamboo frame that was worn by men during the Joseon period — and hairstyles, like the extravagant looks of the gisaeng or Korean Geisha. 

Choi also likes to use Korean materials, such as Hanji paper, made from the inner bark of mulberry trees, and incorporates traditional knots and Daenggi (ribbons) to embellish her creations. She has also used some unusual materials such as cold porcelain to create her flowers, rolling out the paste very thinly before cutting out petals and shaping them with her fingers. “Sketching doesn’t work for me because I always end up with something different so my designs always come from the materials,” she says.

The Dreamer: Eun Young Lee

Inspired by elements from East and West, Korean-born Eun Young Lee fuses unconventional materials with exquisite millinery techniques. In a nod to her heritage, the Beijing-based milliner loves to use hanji paper in her creations. 

“To use hanji is a craft in itself (ji-seung), which comes down to rolling up pieces of thick paper to make a thread. These threads can be woven in beautiful patterns. This Korean craft helps me to make my signature hats,” she explains. 

Lee first studied fashion management at the well-known Bunka Fashion Graduate University in Tokyo, before working for several years in Shanghai for a large Japanese fashion retailer. In 2015, a short millinery course in London during a summer break changed her direction.  

“The experience of making a hat, from design to final product, made me decide to live a new dream and start a professional millinery course at the Kensington and Chelsea College,” she recalls, adding that, “making a hat is a process without limit. Whatever I imagine, I can transform into a hat, and I simply love working without limits.”

For each collection, the designer chooses a theme to “structure” her imagination. “Every hat starts with an idea taken from an experience, a feeling or an image. I make sketches and usually start to experiment with materials to see which one fits the design best. Then the design changes into a product.”

Lee believes her multi-cultural experiences infuse her creations, giving her hats their unique character: “and that is something I am very proud of.”

The Feather Lover: Awon Golding

“A great hat should lift your spirits and make you feel like a million bucks,” says milliner Awon Golding. It’s a statement Lady Gaga can relate to as a few years back, the popstar posted on social media that Golding’s Viola boater made her “feel like Isabella Blow,” the famous English magazine editor and late muse of hat designer Philip Treacy. A modern twist on a classic boater shape, the royal purple velour felt Viola hat has a veil studded with candy pink crystals adding a touch of whimsy. 

Golding’s twist on a stylish shape has helped her attract a very diverse clientele including royalty. On Christmas Day 2018, the Duchess of Sussex wore one of Golding’s Vika hats, a wool felt pillbox with crinoline bow and two striking goose feathers.

“I would describe my hats as modern, fresh and a bit of fun, but lots of my clients say that my hats put a smile on their faces, so I’m happy to go with that,” says the designer.

When choosing materials to work with versatility is key, the milliner says, admitting to a particular weakness for feathers: “There’s huge variety and you can do so many things with them. They can look like sumptuous ice cream cones or fireworks.”

While her hats are handmade in an atelier in East London Golding draws on her multi-cultural background. Born in Hong Kong and of Anglo-Indian heritage, Golding embraces colour. “I love to mix and match punchy tones. Perhaps this is my Indian heritage coming through. English millinery is more typically pastel and quite subdued. Hong Kong doesn’t have a strong hat making or wearing tradition so when I did wear hats as a teen, mainly men’s hats like trilbies and flat caps, I got noticed for it. I must have subconsciously absorbed this attention and now love to turn heads with my millinery,” she says.

 The Sustainable Milliner: Chee Sau Fen

The self-taught Singaporean milliner launched Heads of State Millinery in 2011 aiming to help revive some traditional Asian crafts, while at the same time, helping with the sustainable development of marginalized communities. After talking to various communities in the region about how indigenous textiles and crafts were made, she soon realized “that in order to preserve these traditions, we need to evolve them” thus she has used some innovative techniques to apply these crafts to hat making.

Most designs use abaca fabrics, made on handlooms by communities on Mindanao Island in the Philippines. “This fabric was not traditionally used to make hats so I developed a number of new techniques to create millinery from it. This includes using Japanese washi paper twine bands to make the boning that gives our Kyu-Beautiful Bow collection their sharp yet flexible structures,” Chee says, adding that in the resulting designs, one can appreciate the beauty and utility of the abaca fabrics as well as the washi paper in new ways. “We have also started to work with recycled aluminium. For our latest designs in the “AirLoom” hat collection, we’re weaving biodegradable 3D printing filaments (made of PCL or Polycaprolactone),” she says, explaining she uses a 3D printing pen, instead of a 3D printer machine, which allows her to draw freehand with the filaments to create three dimensional forms. “The way I "draw" is to follow the weave patterns inspired by traditional handwoven baskets - this stabilises the printed structures of the hats,” she explains, adding the filaments are then combined with hand-felted wool fibres. 

“There is a special kind of magic when unassuming raw materials gets combined with imaginative and skilled human hands. There is sense of ease, humility and harmony. I call this ‘Nature Nurtured’ and I always aim to imbue our designs with the same spirit. There will always be a trace of the raw beauty of natural materials or indigenous craft techniques, or both, in our designs,” she adds.

While both of her parents were in the jewellery wholesale business (her father focuses on gemstones and her mother on jade and pearls), Anna Hu never expected to be involved in the jewellery world. Born in Taiwan, and then educated in the USA, she was dreaming of a career as a cello player when shoulder tendonitis cut short her hopes. “I was devastated and suffering from a sense of loss, when my father suggested I applied for a GIA course in New York. I fell in love with jewellery design as soon as I had my first class. I realized that while a window had closed, a new one had opened. I wasn’t a performer anymore, I was a composer,” she recalls.

After gaining her GIA qualification, Hu studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology as well as Parsons School of Design and Columbia University, before getting her first job as an intern at Christie's jewellery department in New York. She then moved on to Van Cleef & Arpels, working in its special jewellery department coordinating the design workshop and private clients, and later joined Harry Winston in merchandising and inventories. But as she was about to turn 30, Hu felt she “needed to write my own song, find my own voice.”

 “At the time, the Plaza hotel in New York had a space for a small boutique, and my mentor, Maurice Galli, who was the head designer at Harry Winston, encouraged me to go for it,” she recalls.

Since she founded her namesake company in 2007, the jeweller has focused on creating exclusive high jewellery pieces characterized by their bold scale and sense of movement, which have quickly become collectable at auction.   

Francois Curiel, Chairman of Christie's Europe and Asia & Head of Christie's Global Luxury Division, describes Hu’s pieces as offering a “unique equilibrium of proportion, construction, colour, and dazzle,” while Yvonne Chu, Acting Head of Department, Jewellery, Sotheby’s praises the jewellery artist for her ability to transform top quality gemstones into “inspirational jewellery masterpieces.”

Hu says “I’m really creating my jewellery as if I’m composing a piece of music, with every single stone a music note, it can be at sonata scale to symphony level. There is a beautiful melodic line and colour harmonies.”

She likens some of her jewellery pieces to Rachmaninov’s music “very romantic with lot of intensity,” or Schubert “with a twisted nostalgia, a sentimental tone.”

But her cultural references, often infused with oriental aesthetics, go beyond music. Her Siren’s Aria ring, which features a 22.82-carat emerald surrounded by a swirl of Paraiba tourmalines, was inspired by Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa woodblock print, while her elaborate Monet Water Lily necklace is an ode to the Impressionist painter’s colourful garden.

Hu has a weakness for blue Kashmir sapphires and often incorporates them in her designs, relatively easily given a lot of her designs are related to the ocean and waves.

In October, Sotheby’s Hong Kong offered five new pieces created by Hu as part of its Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite Autumn Sale. The specially commissioned pieces were inspired by the musical and cultural exchanges that took place along the Silk Road and the star piece, the Dunhuang Pipa Necklace, sold for HK$xxx million (est. HK$40-50 million / US$5 – 6.25 million), setting a new record [[TBC]] for the jeweller at auction. It featured a stunning 100.02-carat fancy intense yellow diamond. Hu says she was inspired by the Unesco-listed Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes in China’s Western Gansu Province and the imagery of a lady dancing while playing the pipa (a four-stringed Chinese lute). 

Not wanting to be “too literal by creating something figurative,” Hu instead abstracted the fluidity of the dancer’s movement into a diamond necklace that flows like a stylized ribbon holding a pipa (represented by the sizeable central diamond). Hu admits it was possibly one of the most technically challenging jewels she’s ever created because the diamond ‘pipa’ can be worn as a separate brooch and an earring. The dazzling jewel, like all her pieces, was created in an atelier in Paris.

Also on offer at Sotheby’s was her Blue Magpie brooch, two sapphire birds kissing above a tiny golden nest holding a beautiful conch pearl, which the jeweller declare as her personal favourite piece in the new collection. “This piece was inspired by the motif on the traditional Chinese blue-and-white porcelain plate and by paintings created by Giuseppe Castiglione, a Jesuit missionary at the imperial court of China,” she explains. It sold for xxxxx (est. HK$ 1,500,000 – 1,800,000 / US$190,000 – 225,000). 

Hu, who divides her time between New York and Monaco, says the collaboration with Sotheby’s was a “duet” which each side bringing their own voice, but the whole project came like a firework in her head. “Actually what you see, the five pieces, are the abstract of over 100 ideas and concepts.”

THIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NOVEMBER ISSUE OF A: THE FIRST OF

The tiny lacquer snuffbox, part of the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection at the V&A, sports two iridescent dragons on the top and bottom, but as soon as Tim Walker saw it he could see “an empress, walking her pet dragon at night time and picking a flower that only blooms at full moon.”

The dreamy vision was the basis of ‘Lil’ Dragon’, one of the 10 new projects, the celebrated fashion photographer has created for Tim Walker: Wonderful Things (21 September 2019 – 8 March 2020), a new V&A exhibition in London that celebrates his extraordinary contribution to image-making and the inspirational role that the museum’s collection plays in his creative process.

The shimmering burgau shell of the snuffbox’s dragon inspired Walker and set-designer Shona Heath, a long-time collaborator, to experiment with ultraviolet light with bright green, blue and purple UV makeup and paint. Working with ultraviolet was a challenging task that Walker had never attempted before but have added dream-like quality to the final works.

“To me, the V&A has always been a palace of dreams – it’s the most inspiring place in the world. The museum’s collection is so wide and eclectic, and I think that’s why it resonates with me so much. Many of the objects that I saw during my research at the museum made my heart swell and I wanted to try to create a photograph that would relate not only to the physical presence and beauty of that object, but also to my emotional reaction to it,” Walker says.

Amongst the objects that inspired his latest projects are an exquisite illuminated manuscript made in the 1470s for the Duchess of Brittany, the whiplash graphic lines of Aubrey Beardsley’s provocative illustrations from the 1890s, and the work of the V&A’s textile conservators — on display will be a dress from Alexander McQueen’s 2009 The Horn of Plenty collection, partially wrapped in protective fabric.

“Each new shoot is a love letter to an object from the V&A collection, and an attempt to capture my encounter with the sublime. For me, beauty is everything,” the photographer says.

Lydia Caston, Assistant Curator of Photographs at the V&A, describes a Tim Walker shoot as a little like being on a movie set populated by models, lighting directors, set designers, makeup artists, hair stylists, fashion editors and photo assistants. “Everything on set moves very quickly; props are added, buttons are sewn on and sculptures are made on the spot,” she recalls adding that the team approach is integral to the success of Walker’s process and his collaborators are something of an extended family.

For one of the new projects, titled ‘Box of Delights’, inspired by a 17th-century casket with a hidden miniature garden, Walker collaborated with model James Spencer to create the storyline of the shoot. While on another project, inspired by Edith Sitwell’s clothing and jewellery in the V&A’s collection, he shot with actor Tilda Swinton, herself a distant relative of Sitwell.

“Tim has taken his photography to a very exciting place for these new pictures and challenged himself with each process,” says Caston, noting that Heath’s immersive exhibition design will “truly transports visitors into Tim’s wild imagination, treating each new photoshoot as its own enchanting world. For example, Heath has created a mesmerising UV world for Lil’ Dragon and the snuffbox, like the other museum objects Tim has selected, will be displayed alongside his new pictures. Some of Shona’s props and set pieces, created especially for the photoshoots, will feature in the exhibition too, including a dragon perched in a tree and other fantastical hybrid animals.”

Walker has been contributing to Vogue, along with other glossy magazines, on a regular basis since 1995, and has become known for his extravagant staging producing some of fashion magazine’s most dreamlike projects.

Caston notes, “You can instantly spot one of Tim’s photographs when turning the pages of a magazine. His otherworldly approach to visual storytelling blurs fantasy and reality to create pictures that are surreal, humorous and often moving, as he says himself: ‘fashion photography is the dream department of photography’.”

She adds, “He is a visual storyteller, mixing disparate references from classical fairy tales to childhood memories, historic garments to a Constable cloud-study painting. He combines these sources all together to create an eclectic firework display in his pictures.”

For the V&A project, the photographer spent months exploring the museum, visiting its stores, even hiking across the enormous roof and wandering through the warren of underground air ducts, discovering a side of the museum most visitors never see.

The exhibition will open with a retrospective of some of Walker’s best-loved photographs and extracts from his Super 8 films from the past 25 years, showcasing his arc as an artist towards his latest projects.

“Tim is somewhat of a visual activist, committed to a vision of beauty in the broadest sense. His pictures can be whimsical, enchanting and sometimes dark. They highlight his joyful energy and inquisitive mind and always invite the viewer to step into a magical world. You will notice something new each time you look at one of his pictures,” Caston says, adding that in the ever-changing landscape of fashion photography, Walker has always remained contemporary and deeply connected to the issues he believes are important.

“He has an especially creative mind and a unique ability to see even the most ancient artefacts in a contemporary context,” Caston says, noting that the photographer has “done a lot to help fashion magazines to diversify, and many of the models featured in the exhibition defy conventional stereotypes of age, ethnicity or gender.”

This story was first published in PRESTIGE SINGAPORE (October 2019)

When Suzanne Syz saw a 1963 photograph by Irving Penn of a tap on a wall seemingly dripping diamonds, she immediately thought this would be a great concept for some fun earrings. “Everybody looked at me, like oh my god she’s at it again, one of her crazy ideas,” she laughs. But just 6 weeks later and the “hot and cold for your delight earrings” were ready.

The Hot and Cold cross-head taps created in silver enamel embellished with diamonds drip with 9.69cts of green pear-shaped tourmalines.

Syz’s design philosophy has always been to “take the serious out of high jewellery,” and she adds: “Do serious quality, but make some fun design. I don’t think there are enough fun designs out there in the high jewellery world. It’s really my mission, with a passion, to do something different, something that nobody else has done before.” Her one-off pieces range from $7,000-18,000 for her day time collection though they can rise as much as $600,000, depending on the quality of the stones used.

Syz turned to jewellery design in the mid-1990s to create high-end pieces that matched her personality. “I actually started by creating pieces for myself. I felt everybody was doing the same kind of rather boring high jewellery pieces and I wanted to have something a little more fun embracing the vibe of the time, not some classic that could have been done 100 years ago,” she recalls. At the time, Syz was working as an interior designer but her decision to move to jewellery was quickly vindicated when Elizabeth Taylor became one of her first clients.

“I was attending a diner in Los Angeles where I was sitting, by change, across from Elizabeth Taylor. She kept on looking at me all the time during dinner and I thought there must be something wrong with me. After the dinner, she approached me and told me ‘I am in love with your necklace. I need to have that necklace.’ I had just finished the piece in Geneva and had no clue what it had cost and couldn’t even give her a price,” Syz says, adding she sold the bold turquoise bead necklace with a large pink sapphire clasp to the legendary movie star shortly after. “I think she liked the colour of the stones because they really flattered her incredible blue eyes that were almost lilac, and she liked the design which was quite unusual at the time.”

From the start, the Geneva-based Syz wanted to create extremely light jewellery and she quickly embraced titanium, one of the strongest but lightest metals, which allows her to incorporate “a lot of stones” into her designs without the pieces getting too heavy and uncomfortable to wear.

“Suzanne Syz is a free spirit who speaks through her jewels. Her creations are a feast for the eyes and such a joy to behold… beautiful, delicate yet bursting with colors and energy, quirky with just the right sense of humor and sexiness. It takes a true artist to balance these qualities, and transform them into attractive and wearable jewels,” says François Curiel, chairman of Christie's Europe and Asia & head of Christie's Global Luxury Division.

Many of her pieces also show Pop Art humour, referencing artworks she likes or collects, such as her now iconic Life Savers pieces, inspired by the colourful ring-shaped candies, a Smarties bracelet so realistic you’ll want to eat it, or a pair of Hit the Bullseye earrings rendered in black enamel and diamonds and complete with tiny arrows in their centre. 

Syz is a serious art collector and she and her husband have been collecting contemporary art for nearly four decades. She was first drawn to Pop Art while living in New York where she befriended Jean-Michel Basquiat. She commissioned Andy Warhol to paint a portrait of her and her son, but unhappy with the piece, she dared to tell Warhol she didn’t like her portrait and recalls he came back with a new one in three different colours and told her she could have all three thanks to her smile! The couple later expanded their collection to include contemporary art, photography and sculpture. 

 Amongst Syz’s newest pieces are a pair of pink titanium rocket earrings dangling from a star (on one ear) and a crescent moon (on the other), the design is inspired by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s First Spaceship On Venus sculpture, which takes pride of place in Syz’s garden in Tuscany, where she has a small biodynamic winery. Other pieces inspired by the art world, include ‘Are you Calder or not?’ — chandelier earrings in aluminium with two aquamarine and two morganites balancing the mobile-like design— and ‘Popeye’s gang,’ a bracelet in titanium, with  characters from the cartoon rendered in diamonds and sapphires. 

“When I started very few people used titanium, particularly in high jewellery, now it’s more common,” she says, adding she started also using aluminium around seven years ago as this offers more colour choices, such as oranges and reds. 

“I’m very lucky, my clients are not the people who buy regular haute joaillerie, big brands. They are often collectors of contemporary art, they want a little bit more fun, and they understand my approach probably better,” she says. 

Syz is proud her Shop till you drop earrings, a fun fruit basket with tiny enamelled bananas, apples and pears, which has just been acquired by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, to add to its collection of over 5,000 pieces from the 16th century to today.

This story was first published in A: The First of magazine (October 2019)

Fancy Vivid Yellow diamonds are so rare that it took Piaget’s head gemologist a year to gather all the stones needed for the four-piece Golden Hour set comprising a necklace, a pair of earrings, a cocktail ring and a dazzling watch. It then took the Piaget’s atelier another 450 hours to create its star piece: a fully articulated necklace set with a 6.63-carat, cushion-cut Fancy Vivid Yellow diamond, 76 marquise-cut yellow diamonds weighting 19.88 carats and another 106 marquise-cut diamonds, weighing 23.88 carats.

“As marquise-cut yellow diamonds are very rare, each one had to be especially cut for this creation to perfectly fit the dedicated spaces and design,” a Piaget spokesperson said during the presentation at its Parisian flagship boutique on Rue de la Paix.

According to legends, the marquise cut (an elliptical shape with pointed ends) was created at the request of King Louis XV, who commissioned his court jewellers to fashion jewellery with diamonds shaped like the lips of his mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour. The cut, which requires the cutter to start with a large stone and involves a considerable loss of material to achieve the desired sparkle, has become one of Piaget’s signature styles and is used in the Golden Hour necklace to bring to life the glow of sun rays on desert sand, when daylight is at its redder and softer right before the sun set or rise - the so-called “golden hour” in photography.

Sunlight, as a source of joy and energy, has been a recurrent theme in recent Piaget collections. For Golden Oasis, the jeweller set out to capture the warm hues of the sunlight dancing on golden dunes and rock canyons with a range of yellow diamonds, deep red rubies, and pink and red spinels. Of particular note is the aptly named Hypnotic Light necklace that brings together 13 extremely rare pear-shaped spinels (weighing 17.45 carats) and 68 pink spinel beads (weighing 66.60 carats) with round-cut pink sapphires and brilliant-cut diamonds. According to Piaget, it took more than eight months to source all the pear-shaped spinels, whose unusual baby pink colour can only be found in stones from a mine in the north of Vietnam.

Beside the sun-soaked scenery of rocks and shifting sands, the jeweller also brought to mind water pools and waterfalls, maybe hidden within the curves of a desert canyon, using marquise-cut sapphires to mimic the flow of water. Amongst the pieces on this theme is the Blue Waterfall watch presents a bezel decorated with marquise sapphires and a white-gold bracelet hand-engraved with Palace Decor – guilloche work that forms irregular streaks resembling the fibres of raw silk but here suggests the jagged rocks of a lagoon. Another Palace Décor bracelet mimics the sandstone walls of a desert canyon while its black opal watch dial (a medley of yellow, green and blue hues) offers a perfect deep-water oasis.

Some pieces in the new collection also include suggestions of the vegetation found around oases with the use marquise-cut emeralds bringing to mind the lush leaves of palm trees or the golden palm tree necklace set with 392 brilliant-cut diamonds cut.

An avid collector of Chinese antique jewellery, Cynthia Ruan founded C - The Art of Chinese Imperial Jewellery with a view to preserve Chinese traditional jewellery craftsmanship, and in particular the art of gold filigree, working with threads as fine as 0.1mm. Having found craftsmen who could still pass on their knowhow, she established a workshop in Beijing in 2005 and developed new tools to help recreate ancient techniques.

Her unique statement pieces are full of symbolism, largely inspired by Chinese classic literature, architecture and philosophy. During Paris couture week, Ruan presented Renaissance of Oriental Imperial Jewellery at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a retrospective exhibition that showcased her atelier’s skilled work and introduced pieces from her latest collection dedicated to the 12 Western Zodiac signs.

Amongst the stand out retrospective pieces was the Ostrich and Phoenix Recital — a long, coral bead and filigree gold necklace with a central white coral carved flower that took seven months to realize — and the Immense Seas pearl and diamond necklace that features eight large tanzanites weighing 77.57 carats and is inspired by the undulation of waves as embroidered on the gowns of Chinese Emperors. The jeweller will soon open a boutique in Hong Kong and is also planning a small outpost at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

Grace Lepard, the recently appointed head of design at De Beers Jewellers, is taking clients on an African safari, with the Portraits of Nature high jewellery collection inspired by the continent’s distinctive fauna. Using rough and polished diamonds to bring textural depth to each piece, the designer also played with the tonalities of rare fancy colour diamonds as a counterpoint to white diamonds in her abstract interpretations of five animals.

The wings of a pink flamingo are brought to life with an array of marquise-shaped fancy pink, brownish and orangey pink diamonds, while the markings of a Chapman’s zebra are rendered with princess-cut white diamonds and iridescent grey mother-or-pearl (a first for the jeweller). Pink, orange and yellow diamonds are used to evoke the wings of a Monarch butterfly, while colourful rough diamonds bring to life the textured skin of a Knysna chameleon, and fancy yellow diamonds complement white diamonds to bring energy to the shimmering scales of an Electric cichlid.

With its Place Vendome boutique transformed into a magical white garden through a paper-cut installation, Japanese jeweller Mikimoto presented its Mysterious Garden collection, which references the secret gardens of European stately homes.

While pearls remained the undisputed stars of the collection, be they luscious Akoya cultured pearls or rare pink conch pearls, Mikimoto jewellery designer Noriko Ota also incorporated fine coloured stones such as peridots, tourmalines, garnets, spinels, emeralds and sapphires to create a collection of 40 rather Baroque pieces, including many brooches. 

The jeweller displayed intricate craftsmanship with tiny diamonds for example decorating a wrought iron gate on a brooch or with the use of a plique-à-jour technique (vitreous enamelling applied in cells without backing) to create a luminescent green foliage on another brooch.

Several whimsical pieces tell a story, such as three sapphire doves flying above a cobbled yard of diamonds in the direction of a mimosa tree in full bloom, or a majestic swan (its body created by an oddly shaped pearl) gliding over water with marquise-shaped diamonds subtly evoking ripples.

Francesca Amfitheatrof’s debut high jewellery collection for Louis Vuitton paid homage to female medieval heroes and their will to forge their own destiny. The new artistic director for jewellery and watches drew on the aesthetic of knights’ armour, swords and heraldic crests to create a luminous collection notable for its architectural lines, sensual loops and spectacular gemstones.

The star piece of the Riders of the Knights collection is an incredible subtle choker, the Royaume. Shaped like a gorget – the armour piece designed to protect the throat — the imposing choker is exquisitely rendered as a mesh ‘woven’ with 1600 diamonds, a true technical feast, with a 19.31-carat royal blue sapphire as its centrepiece.

Elsewhere, the Reine necklace combines 153 carats of dazzling aquamarines mounted on a pavé chain set with 24 carats of diamonds to be worn as a single row choker, while the Cavalière necklace showcases spinels, a deep red gem that symbolises ardour and courage, cut here to contrast with diamonds.

Alessandro Michele loves jewellery. The flamboyant designer, who has invigorated Gucci with his maximalist style, designing pieces that blur gender and blend cultural references, often wears rings on each of his fingers, regularly showcasing them on his Instagram account.

His passion has now been translated into the brand’s first high jewellery collection, Hortus Deliciarum or garden of delights in Latin, which will be sold in its newly opened high jewellery boutique on Place Vendome, Paris.

Dreaming of mythical gardens (Eden, Xanadus, Arcadia) Michele has brought to life a scintillating bestiary that includes the emblems of the house — lions, bees and Ouroboros serpents – as well as the addition of a hybrid mythical creature, a tiger with a fish tail (reminiscent of the Shachihoko in Japanese folklore). Each animal is surrounded by rich flora coming to life in ornate diamond settings.

The collection also offers a romantic iconography with Cupid’s hearts and arrows transformed into glittering brooches full of pink and blue sapphires, yellow beryls, and diamonds, set en tremblant, to create movement and added interest when worn.

Gemstones, big and colourful, take centre stage in this collection with the designer eschewing the usual matching and pairing approach to embrace what he calls “discordant symmetry” to channel the spirituality of imperfection. One Lion Head necklace, for example, contrasts opals and chrysoberyls with purple-pink sapphires, lagoon tourmalines, spinels and mandarin garnets on a leaf-like bed of diamonds, while another places an opal in the lion’s mouth from which is attached a heart-shaped tanzanite, the designer nicely contrasting the luminous blues of the two stones. Elsewhere, Lion Head earrings line aquamarine, yellow beryl, fire opal, amethyst, topaz and peridot along a single colourful row falling from the mouth of a golden lion head that is embellished with diamonds. 

Gucci’s necklaces run the gamut from chockers to long pendants, while grand chandelier earrings drip with marquise-cut stones. Chunky rings dominate the collection, with gold in all its hues becoming the head of an animal with glittering gem eyes or holding in its fangs am array of honey-hued imperial topaz, blushed-rosé topaz, velvety green tourmaline, or mandarin garnet, to name a few. Of note is a magnificent 30.3-carat opal, hand-carved into a coiled serpent ring flecked with diamonds.

Having gone fur-free in 2018, Gucci is also committed to purchasing only responsibly sourced gold for its jewellery under the Responsible Jewellery Council Chain of Custody scheme and all its diamonds are certified as conflict-free by the Kimberley Process.

Boucheron’s Paris, Vu du 26 collection is not only a tribute to the city of light, but also a love letter to the Place Vendôme and Boucheron’s original boutique there, at number 26.

Under the magic wand of creative director Claire Choisne, the Place Vendôme’s cobblestones become a striking geometric necklace with frosted crystal squares embellished with baguette diamonds and a central 2.68-carat pear-shaped diamond that is detachable and can be worn as a ring.

Meanwhile the large gilded horses on the roof of the nearby Opera House are transformed into miniature frosted crystal sculptures for a ring and a bracelet, their manes made of baguette diamonds. Choisne also pays tribute to Frédéric Boucheron’s creative spirit with an innovative use of three-dimensional marquetry combining onyx, rock crystal and white agate that creates a hypnotic effect and draws attention to a central round diamond.

Of note are a few additions to Boucheron’s much-desired menagerie: the cat Wladimir as a cocktail ring, and Nuri, a colourful large parrot, as an ear cuff.

Pointillist painters Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac rendered the sky’s changing colours with small, but bold touches of orange, mauve, pink, blue and yellow. For its latest high jewellery collection, titled Les Ciels de Chaumet (Chaumet’s skies), the French jeweller uses a rich treasure trove of gemstones to evoke the sky’s many moods from bright, sunny days to thunderous heavens with stormy clouds or starry nights lit by a crescent moon.

The theme allows the Maison to explore different types of colour palette, and express movement with its signature articulated “fil-couteau” (or knife-edge) setting, a technique in which the stones are mounted on extremely fine gold wire giving each piece a distinctive lightness while showcasing the gems.

The delicate technique works especially well on rippling cascades of diamonds evoking shooting stars or Japanese-inspired dancing cranes using onyx and diamonds on their large wings, holding a particularly intense “golden yellow” pear-shaped sapphire (12.78 carats) in an elegant brooch or holding a vivid pink sapphire and cornflower blue sapphire in a pair of earrings.

The Maison’s naturalistic vocabulary truly shines with designs such as three swallows in green tsavorite garnet spreading their wings in an interesting asymmetry that makes it very contemporary, as well as the interpretation a fiery sun with its yellow diamond rays seemingly suspended in the air thanks to the “fil-couteau” technique. Of particular note is the Glorious Sun tiara with a 2.51-carat cushion-cut Fancy Intense Yellow IF diamond proudly standing above 21 cabochon-cut rock crystals shaped like cloud bubbles that have been left slightly brut.

Elsewhere orange topazes, pink morganites, mandarin grenats and yellow chrysoberyls express a fiery sun, while white diamonds dominate night skies. Sketches of crescent moon aigrette from Chaumet’s archives, some of them created by Joseph Chaumet, circa the 1900s – are referenced in the Étoiles Étoiles light-as-air tiara with twinkling diamonds set in white gold.

While many of the pieces are abstract by nature, the jeweller still manages to clearly express a comet’s twinkling trail in the sky through the elegant movement of a diamond necklace dotted with a gradient of tourmalines that starts with purple and pink on one side and finishes on the other side with the incandescent blues of six Australian black opals (including one weighing an exceptional 28.11 carats).

Particularly successful is the transformable Lueurs d’Orage necklace which represents the changing sky as a storm develops with the design starting with yellow sapphires quickly moving into purple sapphires and baguette-cut onyx representing lightning bolts. The exceptional 37.68-carat, pear-shape imperial topaz at its centre is detachable and can be worn separately as a significant pendant on a long diamond chain.

The Ciels de Chaumet collection also includes several jewellery watches, amongst them, the Jumping Hour Creative Complication watches with a dial adorned with a colourful mother-of-pearl marquetry pictures a burst motif as if lightning flashes in the sky, as well as the Soleil de Feu Flying Tourbillon dials with a twirl of sapphire, spinels, mandarin garnets and diamonds dancing above a Grand Feu enamel color gradation created by renowned Swiss enameler Anita Porchet.

Graff is renowned for the quality of its stones and over the years the British jeweller has bought and sold some of the world’s rarer diamonds, including the 1,109 carat Lesedi La Rona, The Graff Venus (a D Flawless heart-shaped diamond weighing 118.88 carats), and the 24.78-carat Graff Pink. 

During Paris couture week, the jeweller did not disappoint showcasing its remarkable inventory at its recently opened flagship boutique on Rue Saint Honoré. Amongst the star pieces was an exceptional sapphire necklace featuring a rare 58-carat emerald cut royal blue sapphire elegantly framed with diamonds, and a pair of diamond earrings with 20-carat D Flawless emerald cut diamonds that had been cut and polished from the 476-carat Meya Prosperity diamond, a rough diamond from Sierra Leone that Graff acquired in 2017. Also on display were several important rings featuring Type IIa D Flawless white diamonds – the purest diamonds – and a dazzling pair of pendant earrings with four Colombian emeralds that together weighed 13.80 carats surrounded by 36 pear-shaped and round diamonds.

 The Parisian presentation also included pieces from the Threads collection, a new graphic collection that stars a seemingly random lattice of small threads paved with diamonds, an interpretation by Anne-Eva Geffroy, Graff’s design director, of our ever-connected world.

 For Geffroy, the graphic effect of interconnected diamonds epitomises the current “new wave of modern jewels, featuring bold design motifs.”

 Each piece in the collection was designed to rest like “a network of gems upon the skin,” she explains, with the sleek lines of the custom-cut diamonds accentuating the graphic silhouette of the jewels and timepieces. Amongst the most striking pieces is a Thread necklace showcasing blazing yellow diamonds nestled within the diamond stitches.

 The designer also created several additions to her ‘Inspired by Twombly’ collection that translates into seamless ribbons of diamonds and gemstones inspired by the American artist Cy Twombly’s calligraphic paint strokes. Amongst these new items was a diamond necklace with a 32-carat Burmese sapphire elegantly dangling from a diamond bow, as well as sapphire and diamond earrings looping in a free-flow form, a technical feat for Graff’s master mounters who have to set the stones invisibly to create the illusion of a never ending spiral of gems.

With the colourful doors and window frames sharply contrasting against whitewashed houses, verdant olive groves and blooming bougainvillea, the Greek island of Mykonos is a spellbinding carnival of colour and the perfect source of inspiration for Jeremy Morris, the managing and creative director of David Morris, who has a home there.

Gems in vibrant hues have become the British jeweller’s signature and the colours of the island are conjured this season with bold pieces that contrast emeralds, rubies, Paraiba blue sapphire and yellow diamonds against white diamonds.

Early morning swims in the turquoise waters of Morris’ favourite secluded beach have inspired black opal and white diamond chandelier earrings with micro-set diamonds, as well as a 20.48-carat opal cocktail ring with Paraiba, blue sapphires and white diamonds, while the pink sun setting on the Aegean Sea horizon is evoked in the stunning Rhea choker crafted with pink conch pearls and 83.66 carats of white and pink diamonds.

Quartz with pyrite inclusions, grey sapphire, rubellites, amazonites…the second part of Cartier’s Magnitude collection, which was partly previewed during Paris couture week and will be fully unveiled in New York this November, continues to give lesser-known gemstones a leading role with precious stones in support. The first 69 pieces of the 120-piece collection, was unveiled in London in June and many pieces immediately sold out.

One of the star pieces on show in Paris was undoubtedly the Airavata necklace which features a 125.51-carat, oval-shaped cabochon-cut star grey blue sapphire held within the trunk of a large elephant head that glitters with white diamonds, finely carved ivory jasper tusks and orange diamond eyes. Another standout piece was the Upsala necklace which features an 11.45-carat, cushion-shaped pastel yellow-green Burmese sapphire, along with a cushion-shaped pastel bluish-green sapphire (9.82 carat) and pastel violet sapphire (8.83 carats) artfully mixed with rutilated quartz and jade beads.

 Juxtaposing these gemstones is unusual for high jewellery, which tends to focus on precious stones — emeralds, sapphires, rubies and diamonds. Here, the French jeweller plays with opacity and transparency, pure colours and shimmering nuances to create one-of-a-kind statement pieces that still dazzle.

 Inspired by a sourcing trip with Cartier’s gemologists to Tucson’s annual Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase in the US, Cartier’s creative director, Jacqueline Karachi-Langane, says she wanted to create a collection featuring a dialogue between precious stones and ornamental gems, combining them “without any distinction about rarity and preciousness.”

 “In the end, preciousness is not only about value: it is about beauty,” she remarks.

 Cartier has a long history of using hard stones, such as agate, moonstones, rose quartz and rock crystal, though they were more commonly featured in its mystery clocks and decorative objects, such as cigarette and powder boxes in the 1910s and ‘20s. In the 1930s, encouraged by its early experiments with colour, Cartier included “semi-precious” stones, such as peridot, citrine and aquamarine, in jewellery even daring to incorporate these in ceremonial pieces such as two tiaras created for guests at King George VI’s coronation in 1937.

 “Cartier always played with contrasts, particularly colour contrasts in the time of Louis Cartier and Jeanne Toussaint. But, in recent years, there’s also been a play of contrasts between shadow and light, between brilliance and something more graphic, with onyx combinations to create effects of depth, kinetic effects, and to play on transparency or something more opaque… to create a surprise,” Karachi-Langane says.

 Amongst the new pieces unveiled, the Mauna set features unusual rectangular bicoloured imperial topazes along with baguette-cut coloured sapphires, rutilated quartz and brilliant-cut diamonds. The Alaya set brings together ruby beads and cabochon cut rubies with cabochon-cut tourmalines, cabochon-cut amazonites (replacing the usual turquoise in the colour combination), onyx, rose-cut diamonds, brilliant-cut diamonds, all in a geometric composition reminiscent of the 1930s’ Art Deco style that screams Cartier, while the Hyades mixes cabochon-cut rubellites set against slices of quartz with strong pyrite inclusion and diamonds – a red and black contrast often associated with Cartier. The Hyades necklace has a sliding system that allows it to be worn at different lengths.

 “Cartier’s vocation is to recognise the beauty of stones. All kinds of stones. We pay great regard to quality – purity, transparency, intense colours, etc. – but we are also looking for something more, something special,” Karachi-Langane muses.

 Pushing the boundaries of transformability, which is very much in demand amongst haute joaillerie clients who often want their pieces to be multi-functional, the Discures diamond necklace has two D IF type IIa pear-shaped centre diamonds, one of 26.37 carats and one 26.35 carats, that are detachable and can be worn as earrings.

This Story was first published in PRESTIGE SINGAPORE SEPTEMBER EDITION, 2019

As Dior Joaillerie’s creative director, Victoire de Castellane has developed a very distinctive style while still managing to capture the essence of the fashion house, drawing on Christian Dior’s love of gardens and his favorite flower, the roses, his fascination with the sumptuous décor of Versailles, as well as the Maison’s haute couture roots and its use of beautiful fabrics.

For the twentieth anniversary of Dior Joaillerie, which has helmed the entire time, de Castellane designed a 99-piece collection, the jewellery house’s largest to date, that focuses on stones and cuts. “It’s as if I had put all my collections from the past twenty years into a shaker and what popped out were freeze-frames and very large pixelated close-ups. In the end, what’s left is material and colour,” the designer remarks.

 Daring asymmetry and clashing colours are at the heart of the new Gem Dior collection, a phonetic play on J’aime Dior (I love Dior) in French, that was first presented in Venice in June.

 Mixing and matching from a rich colour spectrum of gemstones, from classic diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and rubies to unusual cobalt blue spinels, cyan tourmalines and purple garnets, de Castellane plays with the myriad of hues, and layers different stone cuts, such as baguettes with pears or ovals with marquises, to create unusual multi-faceted clusters that recall crystal-like formations and showcase the colour gradation of natural stones.

 Though the Gem Dior collection also offers some more-monochrome looks, at its most extravagantly colourful, the multicolour Anglais Ruby Ring features no fewer than 9 different types of stone in a rainbow with a ruby, blue sapphires, spessartite and tsavorite garnets, pink sapphires, purple garnets, emeralds, diamonds and a yellow sapphire.

 Castellane says she uses gems on her rings “like a little packet of stones that have been placed on the finger. A throw of stones like a throw of the dice. They topple over one another and wedge together to create effects of volume and relief just like geological strata or certain minerals such as pyrite, which have very geometric constructions.”

 The jewellery pieces are given names that are evocative of their predominant colour (Poppy, Icicle, Lime, Daffodil, Vert Tilleul), each one is a declaration of love to stones, in turn geometric or organic, but always asymmetrical in design and use of colour.