Van Cleef & Arpels Exhibition Displays Its History

Excessive jewellery homes historically have used Couture Week as a time to current their newest creations to a number of the wealthiest clients on this planet. This week, nevertheless, Van Cleef & Arpels took the alternative tack, touring again in time as a substitute.

For 4 days, the Place Vendôme jeweler remodeled the salons of the 18th-century Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau, its jewellery college’s newly refurbished annex, right into a showcase for some 70 items from its personal assortment. (The home’s patrimony division, which started reacquiring some particular creations within the Seventies, now holds greater than 2,700 items.) The glittering showcase was viewable by couture shoppers and the press by appointment solely.

The exhibition was staged to resemble the pages of a brand new e-book, “The Van Cleef & Arpels Assortment (1906-1953).” The primary of two volumes to be printed by the French artwork e-book specialist Atelier EXB, it contains photographs of 680 jewels, watches and different treasured objects, in addition to some archival paperwork.

Alexandrine Maviel-Sonet, the home’s patrimony and exhibitions director, stated her crew spent greater than three years doing analysis and compiling the e-book like a list raisonné, a time period for a complete, annotated itemizing of an artist’s work.

“The thought was to current a group that’s important,” she stated. “We are attempting to point out, like an artist, that our jewels are artwork items: they’re a part of the ornamental arts, but additionally artwork basically.”

Necessary designs from the home’s earliest inventive growth had been on present, together with a supple diamond-covered hyperlink bracelet with three imposing emerald cabochons, and an articulated cuff bracelet with roses created in diamonds, rubies, emeralds and onyx. Each of these items had been additionally offered practically a century in the past, on the 1925 Worldwide Exhibition of Fashionable Ornamental and Industrial Arts in Paris, the place Van Cleef & Arpels was awarded the grand prize for jewellery.

The home’s signature motifs had been represented, too, together with ballerinas with gem-encrusted skirts and birds with emerald cabochon bellies, in addition to flowers pavéd with treasured stones within the Thriller Set approach. That gem-setting technique, which renders the steel framework invisible, was invented and patented by the home in 1933.

The present included a few royal commissions, akin to a platinum and diamond collaret worn in 1939 by Queen Nazli of Egypt, the queen mom. The creation — a giant piece, formed like a bib necklace — was included in a bit on the jeweler’s abroad growth, notably to New York, beginning within the late Nineteen Thirties.

Ms. Maviel-Sonet stated the deep dives into the home’s historical past had led to some surprises, together with info on how the home’s artisans used diamonds to imitate shagreen, a pure cover, usually from a shark or stingray, which was extremely popular within the Artwork Deco interval. These particulars, nevertheless, are being saved for the following quantity, which is to cowl the second half of the twentieth century. It’s scheduled for 2026, to coincide with the jeweler’s a hundred and twentieth anniversary.