Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele introduces his second high jewellery with Jodie Turner Smith staring the collection. The collection, encompassing over 130 pieces, comprises of distinctive spectrum of colour and bold design signs to Hurts Deliciarum (Garden of Delights) for jewellery both classic and bought with investment in mind. Michele's inspiration comes from changing nature, of the sky, drawing rising clouds in the waves, vivid slopes of colour and graphic constellations in precious gems.
Michele's high jewellery collection for Gucci is divided into four parts, the first part takes natural landscapes as the focus, outlining crashing waterfalls in a torrent of diamonds and rethinking windswept forests into seductive, curving silhouettes. In Michele’s kaleidoscopic aesthetic of excess and familiar iconography fantasy world, leaves tremble on diamond branches and comets shoot across a diamond-speckled sky. Michele nods to the free-flowing forms of the Twenties with fringed and tasselled necklaces and chandelier earrings sprinkled with voluptuous orbs of precious stones.
Michele has dedicated the second chapter to a gothic-tinged ode of sunsets and starry nights and adorned the collection with rich tourmalines and fiery spessartite garnets that bring a present-day feel to Georgian-inspired Riviere necklaces same as the buoyant sprinkling of shooting stars that ricochet across the decolletage and up the earlobes. Michele further plays havoc with his antique jewellery inspirations with what he describes as “discordant symmetry”: so delicate mismatching gemstone cuts and colours to add to the hallucinatory, fantasy feel. Chapter three is all about romanticism, an impressive display of Paraiba tourmaline-adorned diamond bow might be pinned as do a series of chunky cocktail rings, with a rainbow of gemstones, from mint-coloured tourmalines to rose-hued topaz, set flush into gender-neutral domed silhouettes, blanketed with brilliant- or baguette-cut diamonds.
The final chapter of the collection is inspired by the house itself, as one of the biggest fashion houses of all time, Gucci features its fashion and costume jewellery in the collection that is displayed in a supremely precious way. Diamond-set lion heads appear within ornately latticed cuffs, necklaces and cocktail rings, clasping kaleidoscopic gemstones in their jaws. In one necklace, 22 big cats, each brandishing colour-matched tanzanite, form a bejewelled pride around the 16-carat opal at the centre. Gucci’s garden of delights also features elaborately adorned secret watches, set with Australian opal dials and Renaissance-inspired gemstone crosses. It’s abundant in every sense of the word: a bounty that Gucci’s high jewellery clients take great pleasure in collecting.
