Van Cleef and Arpels CEO Nicholas Bos Reveals the Secrets of Timeless Design

Traditionally, a piece of jewelry can begin two ways. It can begin with an idea and a drawing, or it can begin with a stone. And depending on the house, actually, you will see that some privilege one or the other. When you start with the stone or a set of stones, it's pretty obvious. I mean, you have, you know, selected stones according to your criteria, and then you decide from the stone to turn them into, you know, a necklace, a bracelet, a ring. When you start more from an inspiration, which is probably what we are most famous for, you will start with a story very often. And let's say, for instance, you know, you want to create a collection inspired by Jules Verne, which we did, you know, a couple of years ago. Then you will start with the text. Say, okay, that's 20,000 Leagues Behind the Sea. You know, designers will read or reread the novel, find, you know, some moments, some chapters that inspire them, and then they will start to sketch. Knowing that we have a specific step, which is a bit unusual, even in the jewelry world, which is that after a final drawing, we usually create a three-dimensional mock-up using non-precious materials like pewter, for instance, and, you know, fake stones, in order to create a kind of realistic rendering of the piece before we actually go into production, which is very, very important when you work on unique pieces because you only have one go at the piece. For complex pieces, you really want to solve, you know, any potential issues or questions before you start sculpting the metal and cutting the stones, where the jeweler and the designer are really working hand-in-hand to kind of express in volume, in three dimension, what was originally imagined in two dimension on a sheet of paper. Literature, art, film, you know, theater, poetry, nature. Actually, all these inspirations are kind of a combination of three elements. The main element is about the archive and the history of the house. So, all of the stories have to be consistent with and rooted in the house's history. I don't believe that you can, you know, start going in a radically different direction, or do something that has nothing to do with what the house is about. So, in that sense, we have kind of wide inspirations that are about nature, about the world of ballet, about the world of couture, fairy tales and stories. So, these are kind of, you know, let's say groups of inspiration. We have some kind of key sources that are really part of the whole history of the house. And we try collection after collection to give these inspirations new interpretations or, in a way, to bring new chapters in the same story. And so, we will try to associate this inspiration with very often a work of art. It can be, you know, a book, a theater play, a poem, a place, a movie, or, you know, a period in time that resonates with one of these key inspirations. And then, the third component, which is sometimes less identified, is that it has to resonate with the time we're living in. Something that's in the air. To give you an example, for instance, probably the first collection that we did in that sense, there were these fantastic brooches from the 1940s. They're figurative brooches in the shape of fairies. So, instead of trying to reinterpret or modernize or reproduce these pieces from the past, actually, we tried to take one step back and to say, 'Okay, where is it coming from, actually, you know? Why did the house start to design these fairies?' And this is where you start really to, you know, bring some books and to go back to fairy tales. And that led us to William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, because this is where this representation of fairies really appears in Western culture. And so, we decided to create a whole collection inspired by the play. And at the time we did that collection, that's really a while ago, it was in the air. I mean, it was really in the time when Harry Potter and, you know, Lord of the Rings were just out. And this idea of magic and fairy tales were kind of coming back. The last collection we did, which is called Seven Seas, which is more inspired by seas and oceans, but under the lens of Middle Age and Renaissance travels when going from one sea to the other, discovering, you know, after the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the Adriatic. I read a description of the Red Sea that said the sea was red. So, you start to go for different colors than purely, you know, shades of blues and green. At the same time, you know, we worked on that collection two years ago. There were other categories in fashion and couture cruise collections and that idea of, you know, coming back to the idea of elegance to travel at sea and all these inspirations from the oceans. The very, very strong designs, the ones that have resisted time, once again, in our world, are the ones that were, you know, created 70 or 80 years ago and that you still feel when you look at them today, they could have been, you know, designed yesterday. To me, probably one of the best examples of that is the zip necklace, which remains one of the most, you know, daring designs, extremely contemporary in a way, but that was originally, you know, designed in the 1930s. So, this is really what we try to look for. It's more about timelessness and relevance. To us, the design and development of watches is, above all, an expression of the identity of Van Cleef & Arpels. What I mean by that is that we don't think how we're going to create a watch. So, you know, what are the current trends, what are the standards in watchmaking today. We start, once again, with a story, and some of our stories actually translate better into watches than even into jewelry. And when we design a watch, we try to express an idea of time, a vision of time, which is, I believe, quite specific to the house. So, our vision of time is not about, you know, accuracy. It's not a masculine, sports-oriented vision. It's not about performance. It's more about poetry. It's more about the cycles and the rhythms of nature. So, it's a time that goes probably more slowly. It has a narrative element. It's pretty much, you know, the time it takes to tell a story rather than the time it takes to measure the speed of an event or performance. Maybe it's a bit philosophical, but it's really the starting point. And then this is what's going to drive the whole process. One of our watches that is probably the best known today is a watch that shows the time through two lovers that are walking on a bridge, you know, in Paris at night and going towards each other. And it's a watch with an amazing complex movement, but you don't see the movement. The movement is just here to serve the story and to make sure that you bring these two characters to life and that, you know, as the day goes by they would get closer and closer. So, this is very much the philosophy of our watches, and you will find in the watches a lot of these figurative inspirations that you find also in the jewelry. Some of them, you know, coming from nature, so butterflies, dragonflies, flowers, leaves, but also fairies, mermaids, lovers. And we always try to capture, you know, the movement that can animate them and to use the possibilities of mechanical watchmaking to really bring that physical movement and to make sure that, you know, that flower is going to open up, that butterfly is going to fly on the dial.