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Style & Beauty A SEASONAL COMPENDIUM TO SARTORIAL FLAIR, ENCHANTING JEWELS AND HAUTE HORLOGERIE INSTANT CLASSICS True Romance The new Romeo & Juliet collection from Van Cleef & Arpels is a dizzying mélange of storytelling, craftsmanship and artistry. By Avril Groom Shakespeare’s titular lovers, reimagined as three-dimensional clips featuring rubies, sapphires, tsavorite garnets, lapis lazuli and diamonds Love was in the air this autumn in Paris, as Van Cleef & Arpels unveiled its latest, utterly captivating high jewellery collection based on literature’s most storied romance, Romeo and Juliet. In the collection’s 100-plus unique pieces there is something for every occasion, from pure diamond ensembles to daring clashes of colour, from lyrical interpretations of the play’s events and locations to ›
Style & Beauty Instant Classics The vivid leaves with ruby cabochons of the Night or Day clip tell their own intense story: the red and blue of Montague and Capulet are intermixed with secret symbols of day and night symbolic abstractions that create a complex backstory of their own. And what’s more, the collection’s multilayered references encompass not just Shakespeare’s tragic tale but the creative breadth of Van Cleef & Arpels’ stylistic past, present and even future. The Paris-based firm has a history of links with ballet since its first ballerina brooches in the 1940s, and in 1967 Claude Arpels met George Balanchine and their conversation inspired his ballet Jewels, performances of which it still sponsors. Since 2012 it has also supported the LA Dance Project and its director, Benjamin Millepied, whose modern version of Romeo and Juliet, mixing film and live performance, will be unveiled next year. The ballet’s contemporary character seems apparent from illustrations that VC&A has commissioned from noted Italian cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti, with an athletic-looking Romeo and Juliet in dresses owing more to West Side Story than Shakespeare. “With this collection we wanted to explore the universe of dance as a tribute to our history with 20th-century ballet,” said president and CEO Nicolas Bos, who has an art background and encourages the house designers to see how artists in other media have interpreted the themes. Mattotti’s strong reds and blues represent the play’s warring families’ colours, mirrored in the collection’s pierres de caractère, Above and near right: the Night or Day clip; far right: creating the complex interlaced circles of the Matrimonio necklace 38 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
