In Les Formes de la Couleur, the latest range of high jewellery by Hermès, artistic director Pierre Hardy sought to give shape to colours. “I wanted to find a way to express this fundamental phenomenon,” he explains in press notes, to “build a strong, autonomous and independent identity.”
At its most adventurous, the jewellery takes the abstract notion of colour—a phenomenon that arises from light—and gives it a physical, definite form.
A series dubbed Portraits de la Couleur, for example, connects certain shades with geometric shapes. It’s not unlike Wassily Kandinsky’s theory that colours have a natural association with certain forms. Yellow and triangles, red and squares, and blue and circles, for example. It’s not, strictly speaking, scientific—but certainly a creative interpretation of the thought by Hardy. As jewels, Hermès has elaborated red with a square, formed of baguette-cut garnets and rubies, and centred by a square-cut rhodolite garnet. Blue takes form as circles, in particular a round brilliant-cut blue sapphire of 1.11 carats framed by bulbous chalcedony cabochons. Green, meanwhile, takes on a slick quality in a mono-earring, pictured above, fashioned after a fresh brushstroke of paint composed of monochromatic tsavorite garnets.
In the chapter titled Arc en Couleurs, undulating shapes adapt and mould to the curves of the body. Gemstones, selected for a soft palette of colours, create a delicate effect. Not of blinding, statement shades against the skin, but enhancing hues that whisper their beauty. Necklaces and bracelets are articulated with highly technical mesh structures, and in a plastron-style necklace features over 1,400 stones to create its colour gradient.
In the Supracolour chapter, light is explored through diffraction—when the spectrum is split into colours. The heart of the idea is embodied in a one-of-a-kind necklace with a rutilated quartz centre, set with a triangle-cut diamond, worn on ropes of black spinel, grey spinel and moonstone beads; and strands of coloured stone beads like moonstone, chalcedony, chrysoprase, rose quartz and pink tourmaline. Perhaps the most spellbinding, and unusual design, in a collection that might be the most daring venture into colours in Hermès high jewellery yet.
The September ‘Kitsch’ issue of Vogue Singapore is available online.
