Crafting high jewellery is a delicate performance. At Chaumet, the Parisian maison’s latest collection imagines the endeavour as a production for the stage. Dubbed En Scène, this 39-piece collection mixes music, dance and magic into a three-theme narrative that evokes the glamour, mystique and artifice of a carefully choreographed and orchestrated show.
In Music, gemstones visualise the structure and handwriting of music itself. A parure dedicated to harmony weaves lines of diamonds and blue sapphires together, the voices of the gemstones interlacing to evoke polyphony. In the melody and score parures, lines of pavé-set white gold create the effect of notational staves dotted entirely with diamonds or in combination with sapphires and emeralds.
Particularly impressive are the main gemstones mounted at the ends of the necklaces using fil couteau—a technique in which mountings are set and connected on fine strips of gold so that gemstones appear as if they are floating on a knife’s edge.
With music comes Dance, a chapter in which Chaumet channels the movements of tango, ballet and swing. In tango, a palette of blue tourmalines and red rubellites decorates the twisting motif of the maison’s signature torsade. Ballet, meanwhile, features swirling, wing-like motifs with dégradé blue sapphires akin to the pirouettes and fouettés of a ballerina. And in swing, the frenzy of jazz captured in a black and white blend of onyx and diamonds, accented with purple-tinged Ceylon and Madagascar sapphires—almost as if the blues were touched by the rush of blood in one’s ears.
The final chapter of En Scène delves into magic—those gasp-inducing moments of wonder and sublime beauty. A series of Voltige designs, inspired by aerial acrobatics, twists ribbons of diamonds on white gold as though it were the taut line of a tightrope walker’s wire.
The September ‘Kitsch’ issue of Vogue Singapore is now available online or on newsstands.
