Tales of the unexpected: Storytelling in high jewellery

Header image: Chanel Blé Maria brooch

Talk to jewellers about their inspiration and they describe the thrill of discovering a wonderful stone that instantly dictates a design, or the satisfaction of creating a design and then finding the perfect gems to achieve that vision. Now there is an exciting new element. High jewellery collections always have titles, but now these often relate to an overarching  story, in which each piece reflects in obvious or subtle form.

It is an idea at which Chanel excels, necessary because Coco Chanel only designed one fine jewellery collection, in 1932. “I am interested in her life and personality”, says Patrice Leguéreau, director of Chanel’s jewellery creation studio, which creates “stories” around areas of the designer’s life. “Sometimes a collection broaches an aspect of her very clearly; at others it just conveys a spirit.” Her passion for all things Russian followed her affair with the exiled Grand Duke Dmitri, with whom she lived in Monte Carlo for a spell. The new Paris Russe collection includes diamond pieces featuring a motif that could be a sunburst or a medal similar to those that adorned uniforms in Imperial Russia, and the two-headed eagle that was not only part of the Russian insignia, but also decorated a mirror in Chanel’s apartment — stunning as a diamond and rock crystal cuff.

Other pieces reflect Chanel’s love of Russian decorative motifs — she often wore finely-embroidered peasant-style shirts — and the colourful costumes designed by Léon Bakst for the Ballets Russes. Embroidery inspires the delicate, intricate Sarafane necklace of diamonds and pearls, while a transformable tiara is shaped like the traditional kokoshnik headpiece, and the array of coloured stones in the Blé Maria headband references the Ballets Russes. The secret, says Leguéreau, “is a quest for suppleness and lightness, translating the opulence of Russian inspiration without adding weight, making gold and stones into jewellery as fluid as silk”.

Love affairs make wonderful jewellery stories and Harry Winston’s New York collection features two — his love for his wife and for his native city’s architecture. Designs are literal but oblique, familiar buildings from new angles. Winston’s childhood home was a classic New York brownstone, and necklaces and earrings with diamonds interspersed with geometric coloured stones reflect the typical stained glass panels in the double doors. His first studio looked out on St Patrick’s Cathedral, but instead of the view, the brand’s designers have recreated part of the floorplan for the Cathedral necklace, with five enormous emerald drops of pure Irish green and some very substantial diamonds. Winston met his wife on a train and the cast iron eagles that top Grand Central Station are the symbols behind winged earrings and rings in white and yellow diamonds. 

The most wondrous pieces are Central Park — where Winston sought inspiration from nature — as an aerial view with trees and lakes as a mosaic of emeralds, sapphires, aquamarines and diamonds, for rings, earrings and a flexible bracelet.   

The most famous love story of all becomes breathtaking in the hands of Van Cleef & Arpels (VC&A). Romeo and Juliet has it all — young love, family conflict, dashed hopes and death. It is well-worn, but the brand brings it freshly alive through the inspiration of a contemporary ballet version for the new Los Angeles Dance Project, which VC&A sponsors. 

“A narrative gives us a way to articulate a collection,” says president and CEO Nicolas Bos. “We have done fairy tales, plays, books and even Shakespeare  — 20 years ago with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s time to look again and although Romeo and Juliet is obvious, this ballet version allows many different interpretations — all the designers read the text and then had a free hand.”

The result is an extraordinary mix of style and inspiration, from literal to abstract, from the architecture of Verona to the lovers themselves. VC&A’s traditional figurative pins become the couple, in Elizabethan costume, featuring the ruby and sapphire colours of the opposing families — a key theme. The Juliet’s Balcony brooch, trailing emerald and tsavorite ivy, has diamond doors, behind which stand the lovers in engraved gold. More abstract is the Matrimonio necklace, based on the tiles of Renaissance Verona’s floors, its centre stone a purple sapphire representing the merging of red and blue;or the Lovers’ Path bracelet with three big emeralds symbolising doomed hope, and the Night and Day pin with little lapis lazuli leaves for night and rubies for dawn, a tiny engraved nightingale and lark on the reverse.

Mansvelt adds that abstract designs “perhaps encourage a greater journey of personal imagination”, and Rebecca Hawkins, creative director of Boodles, would doubtless agree —although her approach is different. The pieces in Always a Story are not linked thematically, but each has an enigmatic title inspired by its design, and open to interpretation. “I want clients to make the pieces their own,” she says. So Plum Blossom Behind the Mirror, with a tracery of flowers around a three-carat Ashoka diamond, “suggested flowers round a mirror to one person, but a woman looking in a mirror to another”. 

Sometimes stones inspire the designs. “I found some lovely long, slim moonstones that made overlapping lines like skates leave on ice, so they became the Ice Skaters cuff,” she says. “Some vibrant green tsavorites set me off on The Songbird and the Waterfall necklace.” In other cases design ideas sent her searching for stones. “I wanted to mix two momentous events in the Sandstorm and Solar Eclipse cuff, but it took ages to find the yellow diamonds and black star sapphire I needed,’’ she says. 

“But the suggestion should be subtle to let the client’s imagination play. Everyone loves a story — it gives extra meaning. But how much more so, if you make up your own?” 

Sometimes stones inspire the designs. “I found some lovely long, slim moonstones that made overlapping lines like skates leave on ice, so they became the Ice Skaters cuff,” she says. “Some vibrant green tsavorites set me off on The Songbird and the Waterfall necklace.” In other cases design ideas sent her searching for stones. “I wanted to mix two momentous events in the Sandstorm and Solar Eclipse cuff, but it took ages to find the yellow diamonds and black star sapphire I needed,’’ she says. 

“But the suggestion should be subtle to let the client’s imagination play. Everyone loves a story — it gives extra meaning. But how much more so, if you make up your own?”