Young jewellery designers now look to past masters for inspiration to create bold pieces
Legendary contemporary sculptor Alexander Calder inspires the next generation of talent to create magnificent designs
All jewellery is a miniature sculpture worn on the body, but a raft of young contemporary designers are directly expressing artistic approaches gleaned from famous names in sculpture. Playing with form, their focus is less on material value than a creation’s shape-shifting allure and activation by the wearer.
Sculptural aesthetics often treat jewellery as an extension of the self or physicality of its owner and, less so, pronounced style statements.
Charlotte Chesnais is only 31, but has an enviable Paris fashion coterie – she counts Nicolas Ghesquière as a mentor, having worked for him for a decade at Balenciaga, where she was eventually tasked to direct his jewellery division. Exploring her own jewellery since launching her brand at last year’s January couture shows, she juggles “accessories gun-for-hire” roles for numerous companies.
With a presence in so many corners of the fashion capital, it comes as a surprise that her eponymous collections – which have secured her the inaugural Accessories Prize at a barometer of French fashion talent, the ANDAM Award 2015 – aren’t primarily fashion driven or editorially-led. The subtle pieces, worn by the likes of French actresses Catherine Deneuve and Léa Seydoux, and Chesnais herself, are instead personal signatures, composed of elegant lines of gold.
Their sculptural demeanour reveals that she views jewellery as an object or piece of art that takes on another life once it is worn.
The visual references of Chesnais and her peers are numerous, but an affinity with the legendary contemporary sculptor Alexander Calder, and what he believed was a mutual influence between jewellery and its wearer, continues four decades after his death.
His relevance was demonstrated this autumn in London at the Louisa Guinness Gallery, which held Britain’s first solo exhibition of his jewellery called “The Boldness of Calder”. One way Calder’s work was forceful was the metals he used for necklaces, brooches, bracelets and earrings (brass, copper and cutlery) and his lack of soldering. Another was provocation, like his Jealous Husband necklace that traverses one shoulder to the other, with spiky elements to ward off encroaching suitors.
I know that a pair of my solid gold or silver earrings may be too expensive for my customers due to the density or heaviness of the style, hence the offering of a single can open up [a design] to a wider market
Calder’s jewellery is mostly pleasure-giving though and as recognisable as his large artworks, sharing motifs and that sense of movement, just on a smaller stage. Spirals, swirls, circles and curves loom; in orbit or stoking a chain reaction.
Sculpture demands the viewer trace its shape with their eyes or even touch it, especially when it is jewellery that is kinetic. The wearer and jewellery play together in the hands of New York-based Mateo Harris, who emphasises the human conductor of jewellery’s movement with joyful, diminutive homages to Calder’s most famous invention, the mobile, this time perched on the ear lobe and swaying with a delicate whimsy as the wearer shifts and displaces the earrings. Louis Vuitton’s “Wish Bone” earrings have a dancing litheness that jolts to attention and then releases itself as they are carried along with a person’s gait, compelling the admirer’s eyes to follow.