Choisne told Robb Report that the free rein granted by CEO Helene Poulit-Duquesne was “magical” but also pressure-inducing: “When somebody says, ‘OK, do whatever you want and we will support you,’ it can be super-cool but it can also be frightening, because you have no excuse.” She doesn’t need one. Few things more pointedly express the unbridled excess of luxury than having your head in a cloud of diamonds. The structure, however, delivers a hefty dose of avant-garde splendor. An algorithm was then devised to enable jewelry engineers to arrange 4,108 diamonds, interspersed with glass beads and set in 18-karat white gold, on the tips of 10,000 tiny threads of ultra-light titanium. Two years in the making, the statement piece began with an in-house technician usuing cotton to create the shape on a bust. That gravity-defying effect is delivered by the maison‘s Nuage en Apesanteur (Weightless Cloud) necklace, which takes its cue from the millions of minute liquid droplets that form a cloud. Creative director Claire Choise stepped so far out side the confines of the craft that she was in uncharted territory: Imagine thousands of diamonds hovering around the neck, as if suspended in the air. Leave it to the oldest jewelry house on Paris’s Place Vendome to put the freshest spin on high-end gems this past year. If that prediction proves true, we’ll have plenty of reasons to get dressed up, go out and celebrate in real style. A century later, we find ourselves emerging from a very different kind of war, with some predicting that, when the world opens up again, there will be a second coming of the Roaring Twenties. This new wave, homing in on technical innovation, edgy themes and changing attitudes, echoes the ethos that gave birth to the last great design renaissance: Art Deco. Tiffany is now proposing more masculine solitaires for anyone planning on popping the question to a man (although the new designs are equally wearable for all genders). As a symbol of love, wedding rings have long encircled the fingers of both men and women, though the engagement variety has generally been reserved exclusively for future brides. In Tiffany & Co.’s case, the innovation was simply reconsidering a classic category in a new light. Twists of 18-karat gold hold a diamond of more than 15 carats, one of the largest gems to be set this way.īut it doesn’t always take a reinvention of jewelry to move it forward. Striking a different chord, German jeweler Hemmerle pushed the boundaries of tension-setting: a technique that forgoes the use of prongs and instead secures stones solely within the structure of the design. The reference? The rising and falling visual display of an equalizer’s musical audio frequencies in a recording studio. Valérie Messika set a new tempo at her eponymous French house with a massive 17-carat pear-shaped diamond hovering in the center of a collar with a crisscross pattern of baguette and round-cut diamonds, while using the same contrasting motif for a pair of earrings that dangle in a cascading zigzag. Similar themes of weightlessness and of diamonds that appear to levitate took center stage at both Messika and Hemmerle. The “stone” pendant of another was molded from aerogel, a material that’s comprised of 99.8 percent air and 0.2 percent silica and was previously used by NASA to capture stardust and insulate the Mars Exploration Rover. The 163-year-old French maison delivered a high-jewelry collection that included a necklace created via a computer algorithm and sprinkled with thousands of diamonds that appear to float in the air around the neck. The boldest foray into untouched territory came courtesy of Boucheron. While centuries-old inspirations, serious stones and classic settings have a perennial place in the high-jewelry landscape, this past year has seen establishment houses experimenting with new techniques and bleeding-edge designs, pushing the industry in fresh directions.
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