Inside the imaginative world of high jewellery
At what point does a piece of jewellery transcend from the realm of fashion accessories into a full-blown work of art? Like haute couture, high jewellery is an exercise in excellence, precision and beauty—a wormhole into a rarely-seen world rich with hand-wrought artistry, fantastical designs and exquisite finishing, front and back.
In recent couture weeks, jewellery houses have unveiled collections that emphasise the highly-skilled work that goes into creating these one-of-a-kind reveries, foregrounding the rigorous techniques in cutting and setting that take place at the atelier, often over hundreds or thousands of hours, rather than relying solely on the effect of dazzling stones.
The lengths that some houses go to behind the scenes are nothing short of meticulous.
says Céline Assimon, chief executive of De Beers Jewellers, of her decision to set diamonds alongside grand feu enamel—a painstaking, 17th-century technique of oven-baked enamelling—in the house’s latest collection.
The grand feu process is so delicate that if one mistake is made, the enamel can crack. “It means that at any point, the gem setter could damage, even ruin, the work of the artisan who’s done the enamel. And then you have to start the process from scratch again.”
At De Beers, diamonds—for which the house is renowned—are expertly cut for the fairy tale fire and brilliance (technical terms in the jewellery trade that denote how much a diamond sparkles) that one would expect of such creations.
But Assimon also explains that her artisans choose diamonds for their “personality” too. “It’s what’s most relevant to the design that we're working on, not the most expensive,” she says.
Assimon joined De Beers in 2020, meaning the first collections produced since her arrival are only now being introduced. At couture week, held in Paris earlier this year, the house unveiled Metamorphosis—its current collection of high jewellery that explores a theme of constant evolution in nature. The 46 pieces that comprise the collection group into five distinct sets inspired by nature and the four seasons. Many of the pieces in the collection are transformable and can be changed without assistance at home,” says Assimon.
The savoir-faire
of the high jewellery house is embodied in a tiara in the collection’s winter set. A modern makeover of a traditional jewellery piece, the Winter Tiara comprises four floating bands of diamond-set titanium and platinum, one of which showcases six removable diamonds mounted alongside an extravagant crown jewel: an 8.49-carat diamond from Botswana.
“The first sketch became a really complicated technical project,” Assimon says. “But it’s truly a testament to what we're trying to do in our high jewellery studio, which we leverage as a laboratory of ideas. The way those lines were sketched on paper have been brought to life on the final piece.”
What was important for Assimon was that the pieces in the Metamorphosis collection were, above all, wearable. “The traditional tiara, all in platinum, is typically very heavy and is not comfortable,” she says. For the Winter Tiara, she and her team introduced electric blue and bronze bands of titanium, a hardy yet lightweight metal more commonly used in high watchmaking than high jewellery, to make the piece comfortable to wear. “We let our imagination run,” she says. “And you want to be dancing in it all night.”
