Bulgari releases high jewellery collection Flowers of Eden
Beauty may not cure all the world’s ills but with its exquisite new high jewellery collection Bulgari is banking on it being quite a salve.
A funny thing happened at a glamorous dinner at the Italian embassy in Paris in June to celebrate the latest high jewellery collection from the Rome-based luxury brand Bulgari. The event, which was attended by such celebrities as Anne Hathaway, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Vincent Cassel, as well as press and customers was held in a marquee in the expansive gardens of the embassy on rue de Varenne in the 7th arrondissement. After dinner, the former first lady of France, Carla Bruni, who also modelled in a fashion presentation earlier in the evening to showcase the new collection, sang three songs to rapturous applause – the last of which was Moon River. The song, written by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, was originally performed by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which ever since has been intrinsically associated with the New York-based jeweller of the same name. But this night was supposed to be all about Bulgari.
Not that anyone seemed to care. Both Tiffany & Co and Bulgari are now owned by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH – Bulgari since 2011 and Tiffany since 2021 (the company’s biggest acquisition to date) – and both brands have contributed significantly to the stellar performance of the group’s watch and jewellery business coming out of the pandemic. For the first half of 2022 LVMH’s watch and jewellery division experienced sales growth of 16 per cent with profit increasing by 26 per cent. New high jewellery collections from both brands were singled out and given noteworthy attention in the company’s interim financial report (the division also includes brands such as TAG Heuer, Hublot and Chaumet). A song intrinsically associated with one brand in Bruni’s hands was effortlessly reworked into a celebration for the group as a whole. “We’re after the same rainbow’s end”… as the song goes.
Bulgari’s chief executive, Jean-Christophe Babin, says the brand’s customers are not just buying more of its watches, jewellery and accessories, they are investing in higher-priced items. “This is true for Bulgari, and I know it’s true for many other luxury maisons as well,” he told WISH before the dinner at the Italian embassy. “We are seeing not necessarily a big increase in traffic versus 2019, but we see a big increase in higher tickets. Customers are more demanding. We have much more made-to-order than we used to have before. They want more one-of-a-kind pieces so there has really been a shift towards higher and higher [sales].”
The trend towards higher-priced, more exclusive, jewellery items and customised or made-to-order pieces was already happening before the pandemic but, says Babin, Covid has sped things up. “It has accelerated many things that I think will never step back,” he says. “Our male customers have reacted in the same way as our high jewellery customers when it comes to watches. They see a lot of value, more than ever, in limited edition timepieces and customisation.”
High jewellery has been one of the most dynamic segments of the luxury industry since the beginning of the pandemic, as affluent customers – the kind considered recession proof – gravitate to items with a value that can endure for generations. “We can hardly keep up with demand,” says Babin. To that end, the company reportedly has plans to open another high jewellery workshop in Rome to double its production capacity. With the exception of China, Babin says, the company has experienced double-digit growth in all regions.
The art of selling high jewellery is usually a lengthy and measured process. Once a collection, which can take years to assemble, is finished it’s typically showcased to select clients and press at an event similar to the one in Paris. Then it goes on a sort of international tour to reach clients on their home turf – it’s a means of gradually finding the right customer for each piece. It’s not uncommon for it to take years to sell a collection in its entirety. After all, these are jewellery items that can cost tens of millions of dollars in some instances, so customers need to see and touch and fall in love with them. What is less common is for key pieces from a collection to sell on the very first day they’re revealed to clients. But that’s what happened with this one, known as Bulgari Eden: The Garden of Wonders, which consists of more than 140 one-of-a-kind pieces of high jewellery and high-end watches.
One of the collection’s more daring and innovative pieces was, in fact, the first item to sell, and it all happened before lunch. The Flowers of Eden necklace, as it is known, is an asymmetrical design that features blossoming flowers created in tourmalines, carnelians, amethysts and emeralds surrounding a large mother of pearl and diamond flower. The piece took Bulgari’s artisans more than 1500 hours to complete. Lucia Silvestri, Bulgari’s executive creative director of jewellery, says it’s one of her favourite pieces in the collection. “One of them; I have many,” she quickly clarifies. As she shows WISH the necklace, she reminds her assistant that she needs to take a photograph of it. “I have to say bye bye to it. I’m very happy we sold it and I know the client who will be wearing it, and she will do it in the best way, but maybe it’s too quick.”
Another favourite piece of Silvestri’s is arguably the hero piece of the collection: the Emerald Glory necklace. Emeralds are featured heavily in this collection – more than 30 pieces have been created around the gemstone – but this necklace is a standout. It has 11 pear-shaped Colombian emeralds and more than 220 carats of diamonds and can be worn in three different ways: as a necklace, a tiara or a choker. The piece required more than 3000 hours of work in Bulgari’s Rome atelier, and a degree of training will be offered to the client who purchases it on how to transform it themselves. According to Silvestri, the process of making it to her design and with lightness and wearability in mind challenged the company’s artisans.
“Sometimes they do say that our designs can’t be done,” she says. “But then I say to them, you have to find a way, and we challenge them all the time. Every year there is something that is more difficult than we have ever done and this year it was the Emerald Glory necklace. The biggest challenge was to make the mechanism to remove the choker so that it can be worn as a tiara. But in the end they did it and it’s a real masterpiece.”
Silvestri’s inspiration for this collection, she says, was broadly speaking the world of nature. “Gems are gifts from nature, so my inspiration always starts from the gems. We thought it could be the right moment after the pandemic and lockdowns to be more connected with nature.” She and her team started working on the collection a year before it was shown in Paris in June, which meant it was conceived in the midst of Covid lockdowns. “We always had the idea that this was a collection that would be revealed as the world was coming out of the pandemic. We were optimistic and we liked to think that beauty would save the world,” she says.
Beautiful one-of-a-kind pieces of jewellery might not rid the world of its ills, but they have proven to be a safe haven for affluent customers after the turmoil of the past two and a half years. The appeal of high jewellery, according to Babin, is that it is the one true luxury item. “It’s the oldest form of luxury,” he says. “They have been crafted with the same materials for thousands of years – gold, platinum, diamonds and gems – and this has made them very different from the rest of luxury, not only because of the emotion they evoke, but also for their universality and the fact that their value is timeless. Whatever you buy, it will be worth money in 10, 100 or 1000 years from now, because everything we use to produce them is rare and as the population of the planet grows,they will become rarer per capita.
“With Covid we have seen that clients who were used to travelling wanted to enjoy other things in life because they couldn’t travel.” This, says Babin, is one of the reasons Bulgari is experiencing higher individual sales.
“Whereas before they might have wanted something that was 1.4 carats, now they want two carats. They really want the best experiences, the best craftsmanship and the most exclusive things. Our customers have a good feeling that the pandemic is behind them, and the future ahead looks quite good. Yes, there is inflation, but on the other hand there is almost no unemployment. So, I think that people somehow feel pretty eager to enjoy life without too many concerns for the future.”
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