Tiffany & Co.’s Latest Blue Book Jewels Are Its Most Extraordinary Yet
Much ado has been made about the celebrity turn out for Tiffany & Co.’s recent Blue Book reveal in LA last week and Pharrell’s recent jewelry collab with the house, but it’s high jewelry pieces are the reals stars of the house. “The caliber of craftsmanship in this collection is better than anybody out there…anybody,” Victoria Reynolds, Tiffany & Co.’s chief gemologist and vice president of global merchandising told Robb Report at the launch in Beverly Hills. “And I’m not the type of person that throws that stuff around lightly. But it is the finest made collection of high jewelry that exists right now.” That statement shouldn’t be taken lightly from someone who has been at the brand for 33 years. She credits her boss, Tiffany & Co. president Anthony Ledru and the company’s recent owner, Bernard Arnault of LVMH, for the bandwidth and creative freedom to realize a collection of this magnitude. When pressed whether she actually meant an increase in budget, she laughed and said, “I do.” In other words, the team had the means to go above and beyond in terms of gemstones, craftsmanship, and design.
The collection takes its cues from archival Jean Schlumberger pieces, a perennial exercise from the brand, but here it’s taken to a new level. “The foundation that he built for the brand, joining in 1956, was enormous,” Reynolds says. “And think Nathalie’s [Verdeille, chief artistic officer at the company] charge, which she’s done an incredible job with is: He built the palace, she’s opening up the windows, and she’s doing what he wanted to do.” In other words, not even Schlumberger himself could have created the pieces in Tiffany & Co.’s 2024 Blue Book collection. Sure, the LVMH engine behind the brand supercharges resources, but today’s new technology has also helped realize increasingly complex creations. During Schlumberger’s era, jewelry was either first modeled in carved wax or metal, but now 3-D-printing technology has allowed for more trial and era. Reynolds says many of the pieces in the collection were modeled up to four times to tweak the volume, how the stones would be set, and how a piece might sit on the wrist or neck. “When you give it to the jeweler, you’re making a lot of decisions that you know are going to work,” she says. “And there’s still things that the jeweler has latitude to do, because it’s the hand of the person who makes it into a great piece of jewelry, but it had definitely provided us an enormous amount of great design ideas that [Schlumberger] would have loved to do, but couldn’t.”
According to a jeweler on site, one of the more technically challenging pieces to realize was the Iconic suite—pieces fashioned as a cluster of stars in sapphires, diamonds, platinum, yellow gold, and mother-of-pearl. The difficulty was working with three materials of such varying degrees of fragility—from ultra-fragile mother-of-pearl to soft yellow gold and hard platinum. Combining all three was extremely precarious. Naturally, the pièce de résistance, the Wings suite featuring a necklace punctuated with a diamond of over 20 carats, was also incredibly complex. All told, the collection was two years in the making and jewelers were reportedly working right up to the debut to get the pieces ready. Many of the pieces sold on the spot, such as the Arrow necklace in emeralds and diamonds (the bracelet and earrings are pictured here), so, per client request, these are now off-limits to press. But more will be rolling out this summer, so grab these while you can and stay tuned for what’s to come. We’ve had a sneak peek and there are some jaw-dropping pieces to come.
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