Van Cleef & Arpels’s Milan Exhibition Shines a Light on the Legendary House’s Colorful History

It is rainy in Milan on the day before Thanksgiving, and the floor of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele arcade is so slippery you have to use your umbrella as a walking stick. You are in town for the opening of “Van Cleef & Arpels: Time, Nature, Love”; the rest of the small press team is ducking the weather at the Fondazione Prada, but you are hell-bent on visiting the original Prada shop in its original setting.

Milan is lovely in the rain. It gets dark early and the streets are lit up for Christmas, and here in the Fashion District plenty of women are wearing furs despite the fact that their pelts are getting soggy and the rest of world has changed its mind about these fluffy garments. You shuffle through La Rinascente, the department store smack in the gray shadow of the medieval Duomo; you lick your painted lips at the pastries at Marchese, founded in 1824; you ogle the antique jewels in the window of Gioielleria Pennisi (Marco Zanini told you it has the best stuff in town.) And then suddenly it is time to go back to the hotel, get really, really dressed up, and visit the exhibit!

“Van Cleef & Arpels: Time, Nature, Love” is staged at the Palazzo Reale, a former royal palace, and is brilliantly curated by Alba Cappellieri, a jewelry scholar, professor and museum director. Cappellieri had the idea of organizing the show around themes from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and the result is a true embarrassment of riches, with 400 spectacular pieces gathered from the house’s earliest years to the present day. 14 rooms are split across three themes, with galleries devoted to exploring time, love and nature.

The very first thing you fall in love with resides in the very first vitrine, in the very first room. It is a gold powder compact engraved with the Arc de Triomphe and depicting two women—one clad in rubies, the other in emeralds—strolling down the Champs-Élysées. This delectable street scene was created in 1945, to celebrate the triumph of the Allies victory; the glory of freedom over tyranny. What a joy it must have been to whip this out in a nightclub, with the occupation over and France on the way back to being France.

So many treasures to covet! In a room themed around lightness you are dazzled—quite literally—by an Art Deco necklace from 1928 created entirely of baguette, marquise, and brilliant-cut diamonds, cleverly arrayed in seven articulated triangles. (You are struck by the double meaning of lightness: the illumination that makes these gems spark and sparkle, but also the weight—or lack thereof—of these carats resting on a pretty throat.)

In a space called “Time: Multiplicity” you ogle a minaudière made of platinum, yellow gold, lacquer, and diamonds, a trifle from 1935 that proves first off that even in the depths of the Great Depression some people had a lot of money, and secondly, that you really should own a minaudière. (It is said that Alfred Van Cleef was the first to dub these hard-sided evening purses “minaudières” in honor of his wife, who was apparently famous for her coquettish airs, which in French are known as minauderies.)

You are stunned by an array of tiny dancers, the iconic Van Cleef ballerinas with their starry skirts. You have rarely seen more than two or three of these at a time, but here are many rows of miniature performers—some en pointe, some executing pliés. How long can you stare at these femme fatales, silently picking the one you want the most, then changing your mind, then choosing again?

You wander through the chambers, falling in love with a line of diamond ducks—nature!—a pair of winsome Romeos and Juliets—love!—and of course the famous Van Cleef Zip necklaces—fashion! (Both Cappellieri and Nicolos Bos, Van Cleef’s President and CEO, claim that these gem-encrusted zippers are their favorite pieces in the exhibit.)

Then, it is time for dinner. We arrive in a grand hall as big as a soccer field; the table is sinuous, laid with Fornasetti plates (should you pick the one you like the best?) and abloom with flowers. High up on the monumental walls are imposing statues, some with their heads blown off, some missing limbs—sad but valiant survivors of a devastating World War II bombing. They stand sentinel, reminding us of the power of beauty over hatred, and the inexorable sands of time, moving ever forward, agile as a diamond dancing girl.

Originally Appeared on Vogue