“Everything goes back to the fondateur, the founding act and the personality and vision of my grandfather.” Valérie Samuel, the third generation of Samuels to head the French jewellery house Fred, explains to me in a tea room at Josun Palace in Seoul. A night before, in the middle of March, the brand had staged a gala for Monsieur Fred Ideal Light, its latest collection of high jewellery.
The collection is the second part of a triptych dedicated to the maison’s eponymous Fred Samuel, the Argentine-born, Paris-based jeweller who founded the brand in 1936. “I started with Inner Light, which was really paying tribute to his personality. And now, I am trying to explain why light—us being the Sunshine Jeweller—is so important at Fred.” Valérie traced the source of the maison’s solar obsession to its founder’s childhood. A line from his memoirs, in particular, mentions almost exactly the “ideal light” of Argentina.
The result is a collection in four thematic chapters that draws varied Argentinian inspiration. From the heat and passion of the tango, born in La Boca, comes the Blazing Audacity of red jewels set with spinels, rubellites and spessartite garnets. In Exalting Joy, Montserrat’s fabulous parades and embroideries inspired a white, blue and green palette of diamonds, opals, aquamarines and tourmalines. Bright Vitality nods to the greens of the Palermo gardens with verdant Colombian emeralds. And lastly, the beaches of Mar del Plata offered nautical creativity with sailing cable designs in carved lapis lazuli and rock crystal.
It tells a particular story: that of heritage, and of centring creativity at the highest levels of craftsmanship on a brand that takes its founder’s first name. “I realised that some things were put to the side and suddenly it’s coming back,” Valérie offers of the house’s close-to-nine-decade-long heritage. “It’s what happened to me when I came back seven years ago to the maison. Heritage is a source of inspiration, a starting point. But obviously, it’s never a one-to-one application.”
Rather than recreate history, she defines a successful design as one that surprises you to know where an idea came from and to see it translated. “I’m always taking pictures,” she says of her creative process. “I have the impression, if I’ve tried to analyse the creation process, that it’s an amalgamation of a lot of pieces of inspiration” from architecture, art and fashion, for example. The flipside can also be true. “On the Exalting Joy, to have that thread bracelet as an inspiration was quite direct.”
This thread bracelet she refers to is one of the more innovative designs of the Monsieur Fred Ideal Light collection. It’s inspired by the woven embroideries on the costumes of festival dancers. As jewellery, it’s rendered in a tie necklace that can be broken up and transformed into a bracelet, and two shorter necklaces. To create the particular colours, the maison developed the Opalazur, a doublet of stacked opal and turquoise that gives it a beguiling specificity to its blue-green shades.
“It was not that I wanted to innovate,” Valérie clarifies. “It’s innovation for bringing to life an idea.” It’s what makes high jewellery exciting: that craftsmanship is guided by imagination, not industrial means putting parameters on design. This willingness to go further, she admits, is in the roots of the house. Part of what makes Fred an interesting maison to watch at the moment is its balancing act of being almost nine decades old and three generations in, while also championing a light-hearted, youthful spirit.
“It was not the philosophy and vision of my grandfather to be a statutory brand,” Valérie says. “He created Fred with his own vision, his own soul and his own way of doing business. I think we keep that philosophy, even if now, as you say, we start to be respectable because we are close to 90 years old. It doesn’t make us statutory in terms of the distance and connection with our client.”
What makes these words particularly impactful is the simple fact that Valérie grew up with Fred Samuel. She was two years old when she attended her first event by the maison, and she remembers being around 12 when she realised that Monsieur Fred was not merely her grandfather, but someone rather renowned. “He was Monsieur Fred to his clients, his friends, to the concierge at the hotel. That’s the most important memory, that he was a unique man.”
This emphasis on Fred, the man, also played out at a catwalk show of the collection during the gala dinner. For the closing look: a male model, dressed in a white linen suit and boating shoes, his hair slicked back in the elegant manner of a turn-of-the-century dandy. For a brand touting a heritage and identity—sure, it’s nothing new. But for Valérie, it is almost certainly a personal and closely held matter.
“He was Monsieur Fred to his clients, his friends, to the concierge at the hotel. That’s the most important memory, that he was a unique man”
She lets on that in the last few years, some of the most rewarding memories at the maison have in fact been pulling together an archive. It culminated when the brand staged its first heritage exhibition and continues today with the Monsieur Fred series of high jewellery collections. “It was the first time we were able to tell the full story of the maison,” she says. “I knew the stories because I was working with my family 20 years ago, but when I was telling these stories I didn’t have the materials to show.”
Not anymore. After sorting through over 1,000 boxes—of heritage and design, yes, but also financial and legal documents—she found some keepsakes of her youth. Forty years of letters and exchanges with the Nepalese royal family, who were clients of the maison, including an order that Valérie delivered personally in 1995. “When we relaunched Pretty Woman in 2021, I don’t know why but the stars were aligned. I rediscovered my father’s authentication letter given to the client who bought the necklace from the movie,” she recounts of the ruby and diamond design that gave the maison its biggest Hollywood moment.
“The DNA is there, and in 100 years I want the DNA to still be true to the vision of Monsieur Fred. This is very important,” she muses on the part she plays as the house’s contemporary artistic director. “But, of course, you can renew yourself. A brand is like a diamond with many facets—one day you can show one facet, and the other you show another.” A metaphor given like a true jeweller.
One interesting facet of the Samuel family, moreover, is a love of sailing—a passion that has inspired the brand’s signature Force 10 collection. I teasingly ask Valérie if she is a sailor herself. “I am a very bad sailor, so I cannot say that,” she laughs. “But my brother is a big sailor. He has crossed the Atlantic several times and done some races. So he got that talent, education and passion from my father. Myself, I’m actually very scared on the boat.”
When I suggest that perhaps talents were split and she simply inherited the jeweller’s side of the family, she laughs and nods amiably. “I engraved my brother’s [sailing] record on his Force 10 bracelet. When he came back, I think it was from two months on the boat, I engraved the days, hours and minutes— congratulations! I couldn’t do that!”
The May ‘Sonder’ issue of Vogue Singapore is now available to pre-order online and available on newsstands from 14 May.
