Louis Vuitton’s bold Grecian high jewellery odyssey
A search for the perfect stones led Louis Vuitton’s artistic director of watches and jewellery on an epic journey.
To sit on the stage of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, built somewhere between 160AD and 174AD, is to feel something electric. Here there is a connection to performances past. A sense of belonging to history – and not as mere spectator.
For her fifth, and largest, collection of high jewellery for Louis Vuitton, Francesca Amfitheatrof, artistic director of watches and jewellery, inverted the audience and performer dynamic. The audience sat on the ancient stage, there to experience Amfitheatrof’s expansive new collection, Deep Time, through the eye of renowned Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaïoánnou.
The performance opened with a spot-lit Renaud Capuçon, the Acropolis illuminated behind the French violinist, before masked dancers with ring lights as headpieces moved in synchronicity with models wearing jewellery from the 170-piece collection.
Nobody could have imagined that it all came together at the very last moment. “I was so emotional watching it because it was very much a coming together of amazing talent,” the unbearably chic Francesca Amfitheatrof tells WISH. “We had so little time to rehearse. We only got the venue 24 hours before, it rained an hour before the performance. The models had one hour to work with the dancers. Everything was really done with a lot of instinct.”
For Amfitheatrof, the free-form boldness of the presentation, of inverting such an ancient setting, suits her unapologetically modern take on what high jewellery can be.
“Doing something that is a little bit intellectual, modern dance, breaks a glass ceiling, I think, for Vuitton and for high jewellery,” she says. “It really brings together all the worlds that I love. I’m a real fanatic of contemporary culture and art and I think it just really represented all of my passions in that moment. I don’t think anyone really quite knew what we were doing, I think even Pietro [Beccari, LV chief executive] was quite surprised. No one quite knew what they were walking into,” she adds with a laugh.
Amfitheatrof joined Louis Vuitton in 2018 following her appointment as the first female artistic director at Tiffany & Co. Tokyo-born with an Italian fashion publicist mother and a Russian-American father who was a bureau chief at Time Magazine, she was raised all around the world before graduating from the Chelsea College of Art & Design, Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London.
She says that at Louis Vuitton, a maison long associated with a spirit of travel and daring and where her own reference points have included everything from outer space to Joan of Arc, she relishes the freedom she has.
“The fact we’re not a pure player [in jewellery], we haven’t been doing this for very long, does give us a lot of freedom to be able to be very expressive from a singular point of view. We don’t have to answer to a roster of executives or a history that weighs you down. What we’ve tried to do with jewellery in the past five years is to approach it with a point of view that is very contemporary and therefore about the woman of today. And not having an archive allows you to not repeat.”
Amfitheatrof tries on every single piece at each stage of its creation. Her background as a “bench jeweller” who likes to roll up her sleeves means the dialogue between her designs and the craftspeople who make them is fluid and easy.
“I think having this deep knowledge of jewellery-making allows me to speak directly to the ateliers, to fast-track things and to come up with solutions very quickly and to work very closely with them,” she says.
And despite the intricacy of the designs, comfort is also of primary importance and especially as Amfitheatrof has noticed that the Louis Vuitton high jewellery client likes to layer her jewellery: “You know, these are big pieces. They have to feel great on the body and not feel [like] the jewellery’s wearing them. Trying everything on, seeing how it moves, it’s super important. You don’t want to have something that is pulling or digging or stiff. I always look for sensuality in jewellery.”
This year, to understand how women want to wear jewellery now, Amfitheatrof went back in time. Millions of years actually, using such small things as the breaking up of the continents and the beginning of life on earth itself as a starting point for this collection. Divided into 16 themes, including Drift, Fossils and Seeds, Deep Time isn’t only a journey through Earth’s formation but a celebration of its most precious creations: gemstones.
For Amfitheatrof, the gemstones that Louis Vuitton has become known for – the spectacular and unusual as well as its incredible collection of loose stones such as the Sowelo, the second-largest rough diamond in the world – along with the creation of its own diamond cuts, such as the Monogram Star and Flower, have resulted in a recognisable jewellery style for the maison.
Essential to this style is the willingness to upend jewellery conventions. In Deep Time, this is realised in pieces such as the Rupture necklace, one particularly close to Amfitheatrof’s heart. Transformable into two separate pieces, the necklace features a rivière of 33 brilliant cut purply-brown zircons – the oldest stone in the world and not one typically found in high jewellery – 15 oval-cut opals, and a triangle-cut sapphire set into a chunky gold chain.
“It’s these three very different elements together that represent the rupture between the continents,” says Amfitheatrof. “[It’s] unusual for high jewellery to have something with a bit of a cool attitude like this, and it just feels really fresh and unusual and it’s an odd mixture of stones. Everything about it is just so up my street.”
Throughout the collection are unexpected colour combinations, such as the necklace in the Seeds chapter consisting of juicy rubellite and spessartite garnet cabochons. Meanwhile the Bones theme includes the most complex necklace in Louis Vuitton’s history – a bib-style piece featuring a beguiling 43.58-carat opal from Australia.
The combining of stones from all around the world fits with Amfitheatrof’s way of seeing gemstones as a form of connection. As a gem and geology enthusiast, she sees gemstones as the “songlines” of our planet. “They’re the narrative that’s left for us to read about the beginning of how this planet formed,” she says.
Sourcing the stones alongside the gemology team is one of the great pleasures of her job. Amfitheatrof attends gem fairs in all kinds of places, including one of her favourites in Tucson, Arizona. “Tucson is the most important coloured stone fair in the world, and it’s kind of odd that it’s in Arizona. But it also attracts dealers who sell dinosaur bones and fossils, and lots of quartz and huge rocks. If you want to make yourself a quartz amethyst bathtub, you’re going to find it there,” she says with a laugh.
“It’s wild. And it’s a lot of car boots, camps with a lot of hippies. I have bought the most incredible things for myself personally, you know, fossilised weird dinosaur stuff. It’s really fun and you meet some really interesting people from all over the world. And then you have the best of the best coloured stones.”
In Deep Time, these stones are used to arresting effect. Ahead of the performance at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Amfitheatrof presented the collection at the ultra- luxurious Amanzoe resort on the Peloponnese coast. Here her exuberant pieces – the curved diamond Wave necklace set with a 40-carat blue Sri Lankan sapphire formed in an ancient river; Rainfall, an articulated collar necklace that mixes platinum and gold bars with 168 carats of mandarin garnets and pink tourmalines that were formed in lava; a gobstopper of a transformable cocktail ring featuring a pigeon’s blood Mozambique ruby that can be worn alone or flanked by two LV Monogram Flower diamonds – pick up the vivid azures and emeralds of the Peloponnese coast and the hot pink and red vivacity of its wild springtime blooms.
Amfitheatrof’s fascination with Earth’s formations and follies, the mystical marvel of it, was also amplified in a curation of treasures sourced ethically by Australian-born, London-based antique collector and dealer Emma Hawkins for the presentation. This included such wonders as a sub-fossilised elephant bird egg and a “sinker stone” from the Bronze Age. Fascinating, too, that many of the pieces are not nearly as old as the gemstones used in the collection. The pair met when Amfitheatrof frequented the taxidermy and curiosities shop that Hawkins, daughter of the noted Tasmania-based antique dealer JB Hawkins, once owned in Notting Hill in London and became friends. “She has an amazing eye, and we’ve always stayed in touch,” says Amfitheatrof.
They started talking about working together in February, when Hawkins, whose home in West London now doubles as her Hawkins & Hawkins showroom (she also curates collections for Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market) was preparing an expansive Sotheby’s catalogue.
“We worked together for a couple of months to source everything,” says Amfitheatrof. “And everything we sourced is a hundred per cent real and unique. She’s just got the best eye, the best taste. I mean, you walk into her house and you want to buy everything.”
For Amfitheatrof, taste, having a good eye, comes down to “proportions, harmony and a certain purity. You wouldn’t want to add or subtract anything, and I think that that is just having an eye. Nature does it in such a perfect way and a lot of times we take it for granted. The Ancient Greeks were obsessed with the notion of beauty; it was always about proportion and harmony.”
The earthly beginning of this collection can also be traced back to Amfitheatrof’s own primordial inklings in a way – on the tiny volcanic isle of Ventotene, one of Italy’s Pontine Islands. Here she spent childhood summers and over the past few years has meticulously built a holiday bolthole for her family in an actual cave.
“I have to say, sleeping in a cave is particularly fabulous,” she enthuses. “You do sleep the sleep of gods in a cave. It’s primordial. It’s pretty great.”
Amfitheatrof invited her team to visit the island, and her home, for an inspirational journey. “Because it’s a volcanic island, you can just see all the geology on the coastline: the volcanic eruptions and the different layers, lava and sandstone. We had a botanist, a geologist and an historian come and we started the collection there.
It’s very personal to me, but it’s also very closely linked to this notion of adventure that’s still within the planets. The continents are still moving, we’re still travelling, so there were a lot of things that really intrigued me.
“And then I loved the possibility of telling this history of gemstones and the deep time of geology. History is beautifully told through precious stones.”
On the way back from the beach one day, Amfitheatrof asked her team to make a piece of jewellery using only what they could source from the island. One such creation – the Plants necklace – would become one of her favourite pieces in the collection.
“I feel that it’s amazing when creativity comes from experience and it doesn’t come from a book or from a Pinterest page, but from real life experience. It has a magic element to it,” she says.
This story appears in the November issue of WISH Magazine, out now.
