Tiffany & Co’s Summer Blue Book Collection: Out of the Blue
6 min read
If you step inside the Tiffany Landmark retail store at 57th and Fifth at just the appropriate second, you will location a diamond Jean Schlumberger fowl flying throughout a display. If you overlook it, the actual point sits atop an tremendous amethyst in a vitrine just actions away. A further is perched on a kunzite, a person on a citrine, a person on an aquamarine, and another on what could possibly be morganite. That’s only the main flooring. On the fourth there’s a dedicated Schlumberger place, and on the seventh, the floor that showcases Tiffany Superior Jewelry, Schlumberger dominates. At the opening of the Landmark in New York in May perhaps, far more than 30 notable company wore his pieces, which includes the a few gentlemen guiding the whole affair, Alexandre Arnault, Tiffany CEO Anthony Ledru, and architect Peter Marino. Schlumberger, in reality, is the sole inspiration for Out of the Blue, the new Blue E book selection, which is the initial entirely realized a single given that LVMH acquired the brand name.
Why the massive Tiffany guess on this wildly imaginative Frenchman and his bejeweled passerines? Due to the fact massive bets are in Tiffany’s blood. Witness the Landmark itself. As Tiffany customers moved uptown, in 1940 it moved with them, but rather of just a storefront on newly modern Fifth Avenue, it commandeered the whole corner. When Charles Lewis Tiffany went to get the French crown jewels for his provenance-hungry American clients, he did not choose up a couple—he purchased approximately a third of the tons. When he employed George Kunz in 1879, he did not expect the famed gemologist to locate really stones, he entrusted him to scour the world for types that hadn’t even been found out however.
Charles’s son Louis Comfort Tiffany went similarly entire tilt on mother nature in both his glasswork and his jewellery style and design, and per household custom he embraced unusual and unforeseen stones that mimicked nature’s irregular beauty. In just one corner of the principal flooring of the Landmark, not significantly from the Basquiat, the Medusa necklace developed by Louis Consolation in 1902 sits behind glass. The company bought it for its own archives in 2021 for a noted $3.65 million. Stand in advance of it and be aware the wildness of its gold borders, the generous use of opal and demantoid garnet. It has been explained as a depiction of the “opalescent glow of the jellyfish in its Medusa cycle.” In 1967 Schlumberger famously built a brooch for his client Bunny Mellon right after she was stung by a sea creature: a jellyfish.
Tiffany & Co.’s new Blue Ebook collection, Out of the Blue, is an aquatic fantasia that includes the world’s most exquisite gems.
It becomes uncomplicated to see how, when he was recruited by Tiffany’s visionary chairman, Walter Hoving, in 1956, Schlumberger in good shape right in. In its audacity and wit and predilection for unforeseen stones, as nicely as his creative aim on the natural world, his function tells the total story of Tiffany, just one that is often obscured by the graphic of Audrey Hepburn nibbling chicly on a croissant, or by a silver heart on a chain.
“His work is the purest definition of Tiffany Large Jewellery. Nature and stones are at the heart of everything we do. He introduced his innovative thoughts without shedding the integrity of the manufacturer and what we stood for. The chicken is more compact than the rock,” Ledru states, referring to Schlumberger’s iconic structure and underlining Tiffany’s heritage of identifying uncommon and uncommon stones, which began with Kunz. “His proportions are virtually supernatural. It’s not about perfection, which would make them up to date they can shift from just one century to another.” The notion of the fluidity of the many years, the many years, is central. The Out of the Blue collection is rooted in the Schlumberger archives and aesthetic, but it imagines his eyesight leaping into the 21st century.
“What would Schlumberger do now?” was the prompt. “We both preserved and magnified the fundamentals of Jean Schlumberger’s aesthetic, being real to our heritage although reinventing it,” suggests Nathalie Verdeille, chief artistic officer for jewelry and high jewellery. “Today, many thanks to the know-how of our artisans and present day innovations, we have accomplished the the moment unattainable. There is nothing far more fashionable than pushing boundaries and making with a passion to investigate the unknown. This concept was, of training course, shut to Schlumberger’s coronary heart as nicely.”
What he experienced was a radical creativity. What he did not have: cuprian elbaite tourmaline. The colored stones that have been found considering that Schlumberger’s death are one element of the evolution evident in Out of the Blue. Picture what he may well have finished with that tourmaline. What would he make of something like sonoranite? Also critical are the tools of 21st-century craftsmanship, notably 3D wax products that enable his signature exaggerations to be even a lot more intricately realized—and a lot more user-helpful. People Schlumberger fish bracelets can be rather weighty, but now volume can be dealt with and balanced. The technical virtuosity of each and every piece is amplified if anything is not perfect, the designer can see that right away in a 3D product and modify it.
A diamond-encrusted shell can be detached to expose a black opal, while the iridescence of jellyfish is brilliantly captured in moonstone.
Out of the Blue is the major Blue Ebook assortment at any time: 70 parts unveiled this summer season and an additional 67 coming in the slide. The stones in its items are all procured by hand and all minimize to match. All the rubies, sapphires, and emeralds in the Blue Book are untreated, a point of justified pleasure. “In Schlumberger’s imagination and layout philosophy,” states Verdeille, who joined Tiffany in 2021, “the sea represented an not known, infinite entire world. His jewels are microcosms. Out of the Blue attracts inspiration from that, then reinvents this universe. It is a deep dive into aquatic daily life.”
There is, true to Tiffany and Schlumberger kind, a jellyfish brooch with a cushion-lower unenhanced blue sapphire of extra than 8 carats. A diamond convertible seashell pendant, whose three-dimensional architecture and functionality is testomony to today’s technical wizardry, opens to reveal a pear-shaped cabochon black opal of much more than 21 carats. In a chapter of the assortment identified as Pisces, brooches are embellished with extraordinary padparadscha sapphires, diamonds, and rubellites. One particular of the most ambitious of the items is a star urchin bib necklace of hand-carved chalcedony spikes punked out with 59 carats of tanzanite. “I hope he would be very pleased,” Ledru says.
How do you translate into jewelry the tiny tentacles of coral or the spikes of a sea urchin? Try tanzanites, diamonds, sapphires, and chalcedony.
The selection is also a assertion on the position of superior jewellery at Tiffany. “If you excel at this you excel at all the things,” Ledru adds. “It is the ultimate aspiration, the championship game. There can be no compromise.” That is why the Landmark’s seventh floor pays tribute to the artisans who make it all feasible with a window into their observe. And it’s why in April LVMH acquired what has been described as the most essential workshop in Paris, which will raise the capability to develop these intricate handcrafted parts and broaden the range of les mains working on them, allowing for much more jewelry and much more complicated realizations. What would Schlumberger do? We shall see.
This tale seems in the Summertime 2023 concern of Town & Country.
Editor In Main
Editor-in-Main Stellene Volandes is a jewellery professional, and the author of Jeweler: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Layout (Rizzoli).
