The fall couture shows in Paris, which ended Thursday, were held earlier than the usual July dates to avoid clashing with preparations for the Olympic Games, but the season still offered some Parisian high jewelry houses a chance to shine brightly.
Their presentations capped a series of glamorous events around Europe, as several houses continued the trend of taking high jewelry debuts on the road: Bulgari showed in Rome; Cartier in Vienna; Chanel in Monaco; Dior in Florence, Italy; and Louis Vuitton in St.-Tropez, France.
In Paris, the 67-piece Hermès collection, Les Formes de la Couleur (the Shapes of Color), was the largest the house had produced — and arguably its most playful. A freestyle brushstroke, for example, was rendered as a mono-earring called Fresh Paint, with green tsavorite garnets simulating pigment.
And while the house has nearly 75,000 shades in its silk color library, the collection was the first time it had used so many primary colors and rainbow palettes for jewelry.
“It took us a long time to do a lot of diamonds and colored gemstones,” said Pierre Hardy, the creative director of Hermès jewelry since 2001 and of high jewelry since its introduction in 2010. “With leather, silk and makeup, one sees how color informs the world of Hermès, but for jewelry we’d never experimented with that kind of mix before.”
The designer described his creative process as “liberating color from minerality, cuts and facets to let it be more supple, almost liquid or diffuse, like makeup on the body.”
Cultural touchstones provided an unexpected source of inspiration, too. In the Supracolor necklace, for example, five strands of black and gray spinel beads were anchored by a triangular centerpiece featuring a 1.1-carat diamond set in rutilated quartz and surrounded by baguette diamonds, with a cascading, rainbow-like fringe of beads in white, orange and gray moonstone, chalcedony, chrysoprase, rose quartz and pink tourmaline. Mr. Hardy acknowledged that it bore a striking resemblance to the cover artwork of Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
“It’s a real exercise to look at pop culture on the one hand, and something scientific on the other, and turn it into something ultra-precious,” said Mr. Hardy, who also used color to revisit signatures such as its Kelly bracelet, offered in a white-gold version fully pavéd with gemstones.
Even the house’s celebrated Birkin bag was rendered as a small but fully functional jeweled bag in white or yellow gold that had been worked to mimic crocodile leather and then encrusted with nearly 3,000 diamonds, spessartites, aquamarines, amethysts and pink, blue and yellow sapphires.
Ombré colors, couture-inspired techniques and studies in fluidity were also in the spotlight at Piaget. The brand, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary, presented some jewels from its Essence of Extraleganza collection — a word it called a portmanteau of extravagance and elegance — by appointment.
Rather than design jewels to a specific theme, Stéphanie Sivrière, the brand’s creative director of jewelry and watches, said she was inspired by the idea of “everyday couture” and using traditional goldsmithing techniques to produce metal mesh as fluid as the fabrics and trims used in high fashion.
“When we use gold, it’s never smooth,” Ms. Sivrière said. “It’s a material that always has character: it’s hammered, braided, woven.
“These are pieces that really dress the wearer — they’re very second skin — so I wanted to really use color and contrast to bring out a playful side.”
The most important piece in the collection, she said, is a cuff watch with a latticework gold bracelet set with baguette-cut Colombian emeralds and diamonds that appear to stretch around its square green enamel dial. There also is a V-shape necklace of tiny, hand-twisted gold links set with a fiery 21.23-carat cushion-cut orange spessartite surrounded by diamonds, yellow sapphires and trapezoid-cut carnelian set to a shimmy-like fringe.
The 40 Piaget jewels shown in Paris represented about half of the entire 90-piece collection, which is to be unveiled in Seoul later this year.
Travel Impressions
Claire Choisne, Boucheron’s creative director, drew on the rugged aquatic scenes she saw during a spring trip to Iceland for a high jewelry collection called Carte Blanche, Or Bleu (in English, Blue Gold).
But rather than use color, the designer said, she wanted to render water as if “frozen in its rawest state” — for example, cascades of diamonds on a transformable necklace or pools of rock crystal on a double finger ring.
The 26 jewels included a cuff bracelet, called Eau d’Encre, or Ink Water, in titanium and white gold pavéd with calibrated diamonds and bisected by a wide band of polished obsidian sculpted to resemble waves.
Ms. Choisne said that the piece was the first the house had produced using a combination of traditional jewelry-making savoir-faire and technology. A 3-D simulation was used to reproduce the impression of a churning sea, and the glassy rock was cut using specialized machinery to achieve the most natural-looking relief possible.
As for the texture, the designer said, “It’s like an ode to the memory of water.”
