Tiffany & Co. lit Tokyo up recently when it opened its Wonder exhibition in the Japanese city. A bevy of ambassadors, friends of the house and celebrities were in attendance to celebrate its largest, most ambitious exhibition to date. And the American jeweller really went for it, summoning the star power of celebrities and famous personalities from both east and west.
Asian names like Rosé, Win Metawin, Baifern Pimchanok, Rowoon, and Jake and Sunghoon from Enhypen; a healthy dose of Japanese and regional star power in the form of Ayaka Miyoshi, Ai Tominaga, Gen Hoshino, Greg Hsu, Anne Curtis, Alyssa Daguisé and Min; Singaporean personalities Willabelle Ong and Lennard Yeong. Pharrell Williams, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Olivia Wilde were in attendance too, among many others.
As I said, star power. But well deserved, as the brand is marking an important cultural moment with its Tiffany Wonder exhibition. It’s easy to connect the New York jeweller with youth these days, but the truth is that it is older even than most of the Place Vendôme high jewellery houses. And the brand is now leaning more heavily into its history and heritage, bringing out over 500 treasures and objects from its vaults—some of them on display for the first time.
The exhibition is co-curated by Christopher Young, the brand’s vice president and creative director of both creative visual merchandising and the Tiffany Archives, and Alba Cappellieri. The latter, the Italian critic, curator and educator who seems at the moment to be the jewellery curator du jour having worked on exhibitions for Buccellati in Venice and Van Cleef & Arpels in Seoul in the last few months.
The Tiffany Wonder exhibition represents an ambitious scope of heritage that the brand is eager to reclaim and uplift. The archival jewellery masterworks and objects are pulled from its 187 year history, and celebrate an exhilarating breadth of the brand’s strengths. It opens, for example, with an abbreviated tapestry view of those 187 years, complemented by early objects like one of the first Tiffany blue boxes, the very cash book that the brand started business with, and a host of turquoise jewels that may or may not have inspired that famous shade of blue.
A room titled ‘Wonder of Design’ celebrates one of the house’s most underrated qualities: the range of creative talent it has had over the years. Here, the jewel works are sorted by their designers, both the legendary as well as the comparatively unsung heroes: Edward C. Moore, George Paulding Farnham, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Elsa Peretti, Angela Cummings, Sonia Younis, Don Berg and Paloma Picasso.
Admirably, the exhibition labels also give named credit to some of the more esoteric masters from Tiffany’s history, like Donald Claflin, Julia Munson and Meta Overbeck who are attributed for the creation of a good number of breathtaking masterworks.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of these cohorts of Tiffany designers. The combined output of these talents wrote and influenced a good portion of 20th century jewellery design and history. And it’s an absolute treat for a jewellery lover to take them in. Some of the designs come from an utterly old-world view of art jewel making. Look out, for example, for a series of enamelled and gem-set orchid brooches from the 19th century designed by George Paulding Farnham, which have a delicate, organic quality that’s rare today.
The indisputable star of this room, though, is certainly the Medusa pendant designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The piece was recently acquired by Tiffany & Co. for its archives, and holds the special distinction as the only creation that Louis Comfort Tiffany ever signed not as a jeweller but as an artist. CEO Anthony Ledru revealed in a press conference that this pendant is the brand’s most expensive archive acquisition to date, and was hard won against a competing New York City museum. At Tiffany Wonder, it makes its first public appearance outside of the brand’s Landmark flagship in New York City.
It was exhibited in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and was thought—until recently—to have been lost for over a century. The design is mind bogglingly avant-garde even today. Medusa refers not to the gorgon from Greek mythology, but to the taxonomic classification of jellyfish. On this pendant, gold tentacles wrap and curl with garnets, opals and sapphires wrapped almost within its form.
That room is followed by ‘Garden of Imagination’, which celebrates Tiffany’s hero of the hour: Jean Schlumberger. The artist-jeweller joined Tiffany & Co. in 1956, and helped create some of the brand’s most recognisable icons. His Bird on a Rock brooch, for example, has been re-centred in recent times as the driving image of Tiffany’s high jewellery. Here, there’s a row of Birds on a Rock set with a variety of gemstones, including kunzite and morganite which the brand helped popularise.
Other surrealist Schlumberger signatures include his aquatic designs, as well as the Trophée de Vaillance clip that was made for legendary editor and aesthete Diana Vreeland. It’s said that Vreeland cherished this clip so much that she set it on her nightstand to take in its beauty before turning in.
After the Schlumberger salvo, the exhibition opens into perhaps its most culturally accomplished chapter. Titled ‘In Love With Japan’, this room pays homage to the ties that Tiffany & Co. established with Japan since its earliest days. Charles Lewis Tiffany, for example, began offering his clients a selection of imported Japanese goods back in the 19th century—uncommon at the time. And many of the house’s famous designers would eventually find inspiration from the arts and crafts of Japan.
Perhaps the most overtly inspired was the late, great Elsa Peretti. In a press conference, Christopher Young notes that Peretti wasn’t inspired by Japanese design, per se. Rather, she took her notes from the materials and techniques of the culture. Things like lustrous urushi lacquer, ferociously elegant silk tassels and cords, and the highly refined use of bamboo.
These elements, naturally, appear alongside Peretti’s most famous works, as well as her drafting notebooks. These pieces are paired alongside a range of objets d’art that hark to the Eastern aesthetic sensibility: Tiffany glass lamps, precious silverware objects, a kimono tray draped with silk knots, among many others. A brilliant scenographic touch, too, is that the walls of this room are designed to look like Japanese shoji paper dividers, and the vitrine furniture is accented with red urushi lacquer details.
After this view on Japan, Tiffany Wonder delves into other lesser-known but equally captivating aspects of the brand. There’s a section on its innovative window displays, a specialty since the beginning when the brand’s founder would arrange and design them himself. Here, Christopher Young has worked in that spirit to design a number of hypnotic, playful ‘windows’.
There’s also a section on trophies—which is the first time, actually, that Tiffany & Co. is displaying and talking about its 170-year legacy of crafting prestigious awards. Among those on display: the Vince Lombardi Trophy, awarded to the champions of the NFL Super Bowl; and NBA Larry O’Brien trophy.
Towards the end of the exhibition, expect to take in the most famous aspects of Tiffany & Co. There’s a room dedicated to cinema, led quite naturally by Breakfast at Tiffany’s with even some of Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy-designed costumes on display.
There’s a room entirely devoted to the brand’s renown as diamond experts. More accurately, ‘the king of diamonds’—a moniker bestowed upon it by the New York Times as the brand established itself as a source of the finest diamonds in the 19th century. The brand’s reputation for the glittering stones was cemented when Charles Lewis Tiffany snatched up a portion of the French crown jewels in 1887, and some of those pieces are even on display here.
To end the exhibition, a whole space is set aside for the brand’s single most famous diamond. The Tiffany diamond, a fancy yellow stone weighing 128.45 carats that was unearthed in the South African Kimberley diamond mine in 1877. It’s the house’s proudest treasure, and a cornerstone of its love for beauty. Here, an immersive audio-visual display projected onto drapes tells the geological story of the stone. From being mined in its 287.42-carat rough to being cut and faceted.
Proudly propped in the centre of this room, the one-of-a-kind stone sits in its contemporary mounting, an homage to Schlumberger’s Bird on a Rock design with five birds circling the diamond. This modern reimagining took over 2,000 hours to create, and—yellow diamond notwithstanding—features over 75 carats of diamonds and pink sapphires. The wonders, they never cease.
Tiffany Wonder runs from 12 April to 23 June 2024 at Tokyo Node, Toranomon Hills Station Tower.
