Schools
Paris, Place Vendôme and the Rue de la Paix
Paris jewellers dress the body the way couture does: in line, in proportion, in white.
One idea, drawn once and kept for a century, until a screw or a clover is enough to name the house.
Cartier · Van Cleef & Arpels · Boucheron · Chaumet · Mellerio · FRED · dinh van · Messika · Repossi
Rome, Via dei Condotti
Colour before carats, volume before restraint: cabochons like boiled sweets, coins from the Forum, a snake wound twice round the wrist.
Jewelry worn the way Rome is lived, out loud and in the sun.
Milan, and the goldsmiths' town of Valenza
Gold is the material, not the mount. Stones are chosen for their colour and their light, not their rarity.
You can see the hand in it: hammered, engraved, twisted, polished soft as a pebble.
Pomellato · Buccellati · Vhernier · Marco Bicego · Damiani · DoDo
Geneva and the Jura watch valleys
Watchmakers who turned to jewelry and brought the workshop with them.
Rings that rotate, diamonds that float under glass, hard stones cut as cleanly as a dial.
Fifth Avenue
The everyday icon: the piece you put on in the morning and forget you are wearing.
A twisted cable, a heavy link, six prongs holding one big stone up to the light.
Tokyo and the pearl farms of Ago Bay
The cultured pearl began here, and it is still treated with restraint.
A strand, a bar, a single drop: the space around a pearl counts as much as the pearl.
New Bond Street
The stone comes first and everything else is in its service.
Houses that cut and polish their own diamonds, then set them in butterflies and raindrops.
