Chaumet collaborates with Kenyan artist Evans Mbugua on a high jewellery collection inspired by sub-Saharan Africa
Chaumet, the Parisian maison that has nearly 240 years of history at its disposal, has always looked to all corners of the globe for inspiration.
From the Japanese-inspired cherry blossom drawings dating from 1925 in its archives, to the tartan-patterned Scottish bow brooch Joseph Chaumet designed for a client in 1907, the house has a grand history of looking outwards. But one place it has never ventured is sub-Saharan Africa, which has inspired the latest high jewellery collection, Tresors D’Afrique.
What’s most interesting about this collection – in some ways extraordinarily contemporary and forward looking – is the path by which the French jeweller took to reach it.
A chance sighting in a little-known gallery of the work of Kenyan artist Evans Mbugua was the spark that ignited it all. That painting lead not just to an African-inspired collection, but a series of extraordinary brooches designed by the artist himself.
But first to the most literal interpretation of African jewellery in the collection, the Rondes de Pierres chapter. These pieces are evocative of the highly decorative beaded ornaments worn by the Dinka people of South Sudan, the Nyangatom of Ethiopia, and many others.
Tiny beads of red spinel, emerald, sapphire, and bright orange mandarin garnet form strands of vibrant colour that are woven, twisted, and circled into pieces edged with graphic lines of black spinels and white diamonds. A grand collar, large disc-like earrings, a thick bracelet, several rings and transformable earrings with multiple fan-like shapes all sport large cushion-cut sapphires. These stones are almost lost amongst the riot of colour, but they add the crucial high jewellery element.
The Talismania chapter takes a relatively simple shape – round bracelets and rings – but carved from black ebony wood, yellow gold, or gold-flecked lapis lazuli, all boasting stones surrounded by gold, woven to look like the wicker work of the Agaseke people of Rwanda.
Large central stones in sugar-loaf cuts of green malachite, pinkish-red rubellite, turquoise, orangey-red carnelian, deep blue chalcedony and milky-green chrysoprase take centre stage, appearing in some cases to be held in place by woven gold alone.
Cascades Royales takes the knife-edge setting as its basis and expands on it with that classic art deco mix of black, green and white via onyx, emeralds and diamonds. Rwandan royal headdresses and Kenyan Samburu bridal ornaments – with their opulent, layered, dangling pendants on headdresses – inspire the fringe-like pendant of a transformable necklace, ending in sharp points of onyx-tipped marquise diamonds.
The richly patterned Kente cloth from Ghana and Kasai velvets of Zaire are evoked in Terres d’Or, with reds and golds represented via white and yellow gold, rubies, yellow sapphires, lacquer and diamonds.
A glorious necklace ending in a tassel of ruby beads and sporting nine cabochon-cut rubies is the star here, and also has some similarities with a 1930s design from Chaumet’s archive of a necklace entitled chaine d’huissier, beautiful proof of the house’s ability to look forwards – and backwards – at the same time.
The final chapter – the six extraordinary brooches designed by Evans Mbugua – deserves to be explored in more detail (more on that coming up) but it’s a gloriously humorous, vibrant collection of animal brooches imbued with colour and character.
A pink elephant carved from opal clutching a bunch of sapphire, tanzanite, and tourmaline flowers is utterly delightful, while a pair of flamingo lovers, their necks impossibly entwined, stand on a pile of sweeties carved from chrysoprase, lapis lazuli, citrine, turquoise and rubellite.
It took some serious ingenuity in the Chaumet atelier to realise Mbugua’s sketches as wearable brooches (a giraffe whose head has burst through a rock crystal cloud?) but the results are seriously worth it.
