Dancing with Colours: Van Cleef & Arpels Reinterprets Romeo and Juliet
Temporarily taking over the elegant glass-domed courtyard of the Hôtel d’Évreux on place Vendôme in Paris, Van Cleef & Arpels transported visitors to a garden in Verona, the romantic Italian city at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragic love story, Romeo and Juliet, which was the inspiration for its latest high jewellery collection.
Set within a colourful hand-painted scenography by Italian illustrator Lorenzo Mattotti amidst bougainvillea and olive trees, the main actors of this presentation were the 100 or so dazzling pieces that surprised with their abstraction and hypnotically large stones.
Van Cleef & Arpels has long excelled at translating the characters from fairy tales into dazzling pieces. Recent examples include the 2014 Peau d'Âne high jewellery collection inspired by Charles Perrault’s unusual fairy tale 'Donkey Skin' and the 2018 Quatre Contes de Grimm collection inspired by four fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, the jeweller already interpreted Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2003, offering delicate fairy clips and butterflies.
But for this latest high jewellery collection, Van Cleef & Arpels surprises clients by offering primarily abstract pieces, barring the main two characters transformed into two lovely clips.
Instead, the collection found inspiration in Verona’s medieval architecture, its castellated ramparts transformed into the dazzling articulated Merli bracelet using a mystery set ruby technique – emblematic of the Maison’s savoir-faire since the 1930s; its winding alleys and bridges over the Adige, suggested by a stream of sapphires and diamonds in the transformable Verona necklace featuring a stunning 23.86-carat Emerald-cut blue sapphire; and its verdant gardens brought to life in Giardino, a transformable dual-stranded long necklace composed of 451 carats worth of sapphire beads leading to a tassel of emerald beads in one strand and a magnificent hexagonal carved emerald of 81.07 carats in the other.
Nicolas Bos, CEO and Artistic Director of Van Cleef & Arpels, says he selected the love story after learning that the Los Angeles-based, French choreographer and dancer Benjamin Millepied was working on a contemporary version of the Romeo and Juliet ballet, which was scored by Sergey Prokofiev in 1935. Van Cleef & Arpels has a long association with the world of dance, ever since the 1940s when it started making its iconic ballerina brooches. The love affair continued after a chance meeting in 1967 between Claude Arpels and the famous choreographer George Balanchine, which resulted in the ballet called “Jewels.” The Maison helped produced Millepied’s dance trilogy called Gems, comprising Reflections (2013), Hearts & Arrows (2014) and On the Other Side (2016), and is also now supporting the production of his Romeo and Juliet which will be unveiled in Paris next Spring.
“For us, the choice of Romeo and Juliet was a natural one for several reasons. Literature is one of the Maison’s major sources of inspiration, and when Benjamin Millepied told us that he was working on a contemporary adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, it struck me as a remarkable creative opportunity. Shakespeare’s masterpiece acts as the starting point for a new thematic collection, but also for a dialogue between disciplines involving high jewellery, dance, music and the visual arts,” Bos says.
Bos notes that the abstract pieces “establish a more subtle link with the story,” while pointing out the use of colour sets the context for the stories: Blue sapphires and lapis lazuli evoke Romeo’s world, while red spinels, orange sapphires, garnets, and rubies represent Juliet’s, with the blend of the two shades bringing to mind the young lovers’ passion.
Of note is the Balcone clip with the two lovers delicately carved in rose gold hiding behind a diamond balcony surrounded by emerald and tsavorite garnet ivy.
First Published in Prestige (Sep edition)
