Van Cleef & Arpels’ Nicolas Bos on Le Grand Tour collection unveiled in Rome: the luxury jeweller’s president and CEO talks clients in Asia and explains why high jewellery is a thriving business

Jun 27 , 2023

Van Cleef & Arpels brought its Le Grand Tour collection to Rome in June. Photos: Handout

This spring has seen brands travel the world to host lavish high jewellery events, with Cartier, Piaget and Gucci in Florence; Chanel in London; Dior in Lake Como; and Louis Vuitton in Athens

Meanwhile, Van Cleef & Arpels – renowned for collections like Alhambra and Perlée – chose Rome’s Villa Medici to unveil its new Le Grand Tour pieces, which include bracelets and brooches

Holding lavish events in beautiful locations has become par for the course for luxury brands hoping to impress clients and editors. This spring alone, jewellery and fashion houses have travelled to Florence (Cartier, Piaget and Gucci), London (Chanel), Lake Como (Dior) and Athens (Louis Vuitton) to unveil their high jewellery creations.

While there is often a connection between those places and the pieces shown there, most of the time the link is tenuous at best, and the location serves as just a pretty backdrop to the works on display.

Van Cleef & Arpels showcased its latest high jewellery collection in Rome.

For Nicolas Bos, president and CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, however, showcasing the maison’s latest high jewellery collection in Rome made complete sense. The range was inspired by the Grand Tour, a journey that young aristocrats, scholars and artists from England would embark on in the 18th and 19th centuries to complete their education. The tour, which kicked off in London, took them to Paris and Baden-Baden and culminated in Italy, where they discovered the ancient ruins of Rome and Naples and the architecture of Florence and Venice.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of the Grand Tour,” says Bos in an interview the day after the unveiling of the collection at Rome’s Villa Medici, the seat of the French Academy.

“It has so much depth and there are so many stories. There’s a lot to discover, a lot of visual material, lots of text and poetry and many inspiring elements. Europe and Italy at the time were very different from the vision of it we have today. Rome was covered in trees, the temples had not been preserved and there were broken columns and wild nature. This is how Romanticism developed: a very romantic vision of nature with all the ruins and ancient civilisations. There was a lot of material, like paintings, sculptures, travel diaries and also decorative arts and jewellery. It was a very interesting story that could be read at many different levels.”

Van Cleef & Arpels just released a collection inspired by the Grand Tour.

While developing the collection, Bos and the design team of Van Cleef & Arpels conjured up a visual journey that took them to every destination of the Grand Tour. Their goal was to evoke each of those places so rich in iconography through jewels. The collection was brought to life in Rome, where live performers – some of them wearing pieces from the range – reenacted scenes that you would have found in 18th-century Venice or Naples.

The jewels in Le Grand Tour, as the collection is named, evoke those places in a subtle way, but there are also examples of what Bos calls “painting with stones”. Four bracelets made of diamonds and coloured gems, for instance, depict Italian landscapes similar to those you would find in travel books of the time. In the Rome sections, three brooches feature engraved stones dating back to ancient Rome. One of them, a sapphire, is carved with the likeness of the emperor Caracalla.