Louis Vuitton high jewellery collection Bravery
An impressively regal jewellery collection designed to honour the journey of the house’s founder has Louis Vuitton’s life and work at its centre.
In the crudest sense, jewellery is a numbers game. In a breakdown of the inherent beauty of numbers, it’s about the days, weeks, months, even years that can go into creating just a single piece of high jewellery. The number of artisans and hands involved in their making. And the most important number of all– the stones, the quantities in which they are used, the carats and weights.
Numbers play an even more intimate role in Bravery, the latest high jewellery collection from Louis Vuitton, created by Francesca Amfitheatrof, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director for watches and jewellery.
According to Amfitheatrof, the Bravery collection pays homage to the life and career of the maison’s founder Louis Vuitton, from his birth to the life-changing journey across France that would define his work. In fact the word biography might be a more apt way to describe the message of Bravery.
“Driven by his curiosity about the world, he embarked on that incredible journey across France,” says Amfitheatrof. “That’s why we have named this collection Bravery.
“It’s not a word often used in high jewellery, yet these notions of determination and adventure are intrinsic to Louis Vuitton, and we wanted to express them through this collection.”
The collection – or biography – begins with the number 200, the number of years since Louis’ birth. Ninety represents the number of pieces that were created in honour of the founder’s bicentenary, and eight is the number of chapters that chart his biography.
On a more individual level, these numbers become even more impressive. The number 1890 – the year that Louis Vuitton invented his unpickable lock – is reinterpreted by Amfitheatrof in the Le Tumbler chapter, the first time a lock has inspired a high jewellery design. The Le Tumbler range is resplendent with diamonds and Santa Maria-type cerulean aquamarines in a series of bracelets, necklaces and earrings featuring more than 130 gemstones.
The La Venture necklace represents the 400km of roads that separates the Jura area of Louis Vuitton’s birth and his future base, Paris. A creation that took more than 1600 hours to make, the La Venture consists of three rows of platinum, yellow and white gold pavé-set with diamonds and dotted with the unique, verdant green of precious Colombian emeralds representing the forests found along the journey.
The centrepiece of the Bravery collection is Le Mythe – a necklace that can be worn 12 ways.
The result of 1300 hours of intense work, Le Mythe consists of three rows containing three flawless sugarloaf cabochons: a 19.70-carat Sri Lankan sapphire, an 8.64-carat Colombian emerald of deep green and a 7.11-carat Madagascan sapphire. Featuring the iconic emblems of the Louis Vuitton brand – the Damier check and the Monogram flower – it nests upon a bed of radiant diamonds.
Of course there is one thing you cannot put a number on, and that’s the sheer beauty of this new collection. That is something that will remain immeasurable
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