A French Stylist to Supermodels Turns His Hand to Jewelry Design
A French Stylist to Supermodels Turns His Hand to Jewelry Design
After spotting several Surrealist-inspired teary-eye necklaces on a handful of fashion types during couture week, Vogue decided to look into it. As it turns out, the French stylist Samuel François—whose long roster of brands and celebrities includes Kate Moss, Arizona Muse, and Gisele Bundchen (other names here) and who is fashion director of Numéro magazine—is moonlighting in jewelry design.
“It’s really just something I began for myself in a very empirical way,” he said in a phone interview. The idea sort of crystallized, he explained, when he bought an Afghan rams’ head bracelet while on vacation in Thailand a few years ago. Once back home in Paris, a try at sculpting soon resulted in bronze and enamel jewelry. Not that jewelry was entirely new to him: He had worked on runway pieces for Martine Sitbon and other designers in the past, but it was the first time he had taken up a hobby just for himself.
“I love styling, but we live at a frenetic pace,” he said. “I didn’t want to miss a chance to do something more personal and whimsical. I guess it’s kind of my way of showing that I can do something besides putting clothes together nicely.”
François describes his aesthetic as a cross-pollination of his love for fashion and a passion for the city of Naples, with its jumble of antiquity and mythology and one destination in particular, Nathalie de Saint Phalle’s boutique hotel, the Albergo del Purgatorio. Even so, François allows, his mother recently pointed out that his teary eye is a throwback to a drawing he did over and over again as a child. “I’d completely forgotten that,” he said. Fast forward to this season, and things have kind of snowballed. A fledgling Instagram feed is serving as a placeholder until the French stylist can get an actual website up and running. Meanwhile, per usual, the designer is packing his jewelry kit when he heads out for vacation this summer.
Samuel Francois jewelry ranges from 150 euros for a pair of earrings or 280 euros for a panther ring to 1,500 euros for the necklaces that debut exclusively here.
