EXCLUSIVE: Bulgari Scion Embraces Jewelry Heritage in Namesake Giorgio B Brand
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When you’re the fourth generation to enter a field, there is a feeling of having to live up to your ancestors and doing justice to the name.
For 46-year-old Giorgio Bulgari, there is also the added impetus of making sure he leaves his own mark.
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“I feel the obligation to create pieces that have a certain stature,” he told WWD ahead of the launch of his Giorgio B jewelry label at Dover Street Market in London on Wednesday. “It gives me the motivation and pressure, if that’s the right word, to do things in a certain way.”
Priced between $5,000 and $50,000, the bold volumes and striking angles of his designs are certainly not for wallflowers and Giorgio B already counts among its clients Sharon Stone, who wore a pair of palm-shaped earrings to this year’s Vanity Fair Oscar after party.
As one of the great-grandchildren of Sotirio Bulgari, who founded the Roman jewelry house now owned by luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Giorgio Bulgari has been steeped in jewelry since his childhood, but also in design.
“My father was very much involved in the family business, and I was pretty mesmerized by his work,” he said, recalling Gianni Bulgari sketching anything from jewels and watches to car dashboards. “And that certainly had a strong influence on me when I was a kid.”
Even so, the New York-born, Rome-raised jeweler, who studied art history and advertising at Boston University in the U.S. took a circuitous route back to the familiar fold of jewelry.
Four years in finance, working between New York and Miami at the cusp of the 2000s, gave him “his independence.” But eventually, the call of jewels was stronger although the first ones he worked on were of the mechanical kind by heading to Switzerland to join his father Gianni Bulgari, who’d gone into watchmaking in 1989.
“I was very attracted to it because of its industrial design nature and I thought I could pop down to Rome from time to time and follow up on the jewelry side,” he said. Eventually, he worked with Ferragamo in 2011 on a fine jewelry line, tipping the scale definitively toward gemstones.
In 2014, he joined Marina B as creative director and although his aunt had already exited the company, the creative process was very much a dialogue between the two of them, tapping into the brand’s archive and her “extraordinary style that was very much rooted in the Bulgari style while being very identifiably [her own]” and giving them his spin.
Upon founding the Giorgio B company in 2017, Giorgio Bulgari “thought it most natural to start from the top,” making bespoke jewels for clients. But eventually “it was time to exercise a bit more [his own] creativity from a clean canvas,” he said.
“Each one of these clients is a different journey and there’s something you learn [from] each other but the flip side is that [the result] is always the ultimate choice of the client,” he said.
The “Goccia” line, the first that sprang to his mind, stemming from “an idea of working with volume in a different way and adorning it [with] a decor to have elements which are more unusual [like] these half spheres,” he said.
Meanwhile, the “Palma” designs take after palm fronds, in particular in the mix of brushed surfaces and polished edges meant to capture the light, a trait shared by jewels and their plant inspiration.
“I was inspired by a book somebody gave me on Kew Gardens because I collect palm books — I’m a bit obsessed by palm trees,” he confessed.
Rose gold is his preferred material, complimentary to skin and gemstones alike. He also confessed a proclivity for stones with character, and “warmer colored diamonds,” particularly those from old mines. In the Giorgio B lines, there will also be white gold. Among his recent unique-piece designs is an octagonal red spinel on an asymmetrical band that has been lacquered black, leaving only a gold outline framing the stone.
That said, Giorgio Bulgari isn’t about to rest on any family laurels — or palms.
“I’m a fourth-generation jeweler, and I’ve been involved in this since my birth. I wouldn’t say it gives me legitimacy but [it] certainly casts a different perception,” he said. “There’s an element of trust and [success] is in the relationship that one builds with a client.”
Hence why he intends to go slow and steady, starting in London, and is already eyeing the U.S. as a market where his work could find resonance. Though retail development plans are still under wraps, he could see his designs in art galleries, noting that independent jewelers often showed at art fairs such as TEFAF Maastricht in the Netherlands or New York’s The Armory Show.
He is adamant about starting with physical retail as he feels touch is essential to Giorgio B’s designs, even if he views e-commerce as inevitable down the line for the brand. “I know it’s very much out of touch with [retail] reality today but it’s part of who I am and my education,” he said.
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