Precious Pleats? Please! These Dazzling Gems Were Inspired by Haute Couture
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
The mastery of seemingly simple gestures often requires prodigious technique. Twentieth-century couturier Germaine Krebs, better known as Madame Grès, knew as much. Her most recognizable work, sculptural goddess gowns that looked bound for Mount Olympus, had an effortless mien that belied the intricate draping, hand-pleating, and hundreds of hours of labor they could entail.
It was Krebs’s work from the 1950s that Van Cleef & Arpels turned to, alongside archival 1990s designs of its own, as a point of departure for the Draperie Mystérieuse clip, one of 25 pieces from the Legend of Diamonds high-jewelry collection. A collage of diamonds, precious gems, and white gold mimics the shape of cascading fabric, culminating in a graduated fringe of three pear-shape diamonds. Part of the cache cut from the Lesotho Legend, a 910-carat rough, the trio of stones is free of inclusions and exhibits remarkable brilliance.
Rows of emeralds and sapphires are placed using the Mystery Set technique, which secures stones side by side sans prongs or other apparent support, a Van Cleef signature patented by the maison in 1933. In this case, its execution is made more challenging as lengths of these jewels adhere to a twisting, torquing plane rather than a flat one. Precious pleats? Please.
This story originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
You Might Also Like
