How do you measure a body of work? For much of the jewelry world, it’s a hard question to answer. Archives are just the tip of the iceberg: sketches and guaches (realistic painted renderings of jewelry ahead of their creation) are limitless, and personal collections often span the globe and can be hard to track. For Van Cleef & Arpels, a historic French jewelry house, the answer is nebulous, but they’re making a good attempt to document it with a duo of anthologies. The first of the books, The Van Cleef & Arpels Collection, published last month, focuses on jewels, precious objects, and watchmaking pieces from 1906 until 1953.
Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels
Beyond simply highlighting sketches and imagery of the jewelry pieces, the new Van Cleef & Arpels book situates many of the pieces in context through fashion photography, portraits of them worn, and vintage advertisements. Amid the pages of the first volume, the reader experiences the magnitude of pieces (700 to be exact) through new lenses such as art history, world history, and culture—one of which being Vogue photography.
