Piaget, Chaumet, Chanel and Cartier look to the stars for inspiration

Designers are looking to the stars, judging by the heavenly collections the grand jewellery maisons unveiled in Paris in the summer. Comets, shooting stars, fiery suns and crescent moons radiate light through the collections of Piaget, Chaumet, Chanel and Cartier, and provide a beautifully poetic showcase for their gemstones and the savoir faire of ateliers.

The sun is one of the most important motifs and source of inspiration for Piaget, explains the maison’s creative director Stéphanie Sivrière. “Celebratory, captivating and resolutely joyful, Piaget’s creations have always been solar and radiant.” She points out how, since the maison’s earliest jewellery designs of the 1960s, sunlight has shone through the jewellery as has the warmth of gold: “gold and gemstones have brought the sun’s radiance to life”.

Recent collections – Sunlight Escape, Sunlight Journey and now Golden Oasis – illustrate the gemstone colour spectrum from the hot pinks of dawn towards the fiery oranges of dusk through every phase of the sun. It is a reflection of Piaget’s “sunny side of life” design philosophy that permeates all their creations. “It’s all about saying yes to life, being solar, joyful, audacious, daring and confident,” says Sivrière.

Cartier and Chaumet are similarly drawn to the heat and power of the sun in their high jewellery. Cartier’s Magnitude collection is all about the forces of nature and the clashing of dynamically different precious gemstones and ornamental hard stones such as sharply cut rays of yellow sapphires contrasting the cool smooth blue planets of lapis lazuli in the Equinoxe necklace, or the all-powerful palette of golden yellow shading to brown hues of the sun in its Yuma diamond necklace and earrings.

Since the 19th century, Chaumet has been creating jewels inspired by the celestial vault. Particularly during the Belle Époque, the jeweller was illuminating clients with magnificent tiaras, brooches, earrings, necklaces and bodice jewellery shimmering with starry diamond cascades, crescent moons, comets and the sun. Creative director Claire Dévé-Rakoff turned to the maison’s rich archives of cosmic designs for inspiration for the Les Ciels de Chaumet collection.

Rather than being thematic, Chaumet’s CEO Jean-Marc Mansvelt describes the creative process as “artistic logic. Les Ciels de Chaumet collection is composed of different chapters: [some] sections more figurative such as stars, the inhabitants [birds], and others [are] more abstract, like for example the moods of the sky”.