Francesca Amfitheatrof hopes that somewhere out there in the galaxy there exists a planet made entirely of gemstones. She expressed her wish as she showed us the first item in the launch of Louis Vuitton’s new high jewellery collection, Deep Time, in Porto Heli, Greece – not a bib-sized necklace or an enormous cuff, but a slice of the 4.5 billion-year-old imilac pallastite meteorite, brimming with pale green crystals of olivine, formed at the birth of our solar system.
Louis Vuitton’s artistic director for watches and jewellery gets genuinely excited about this, arguably the nerdier side of the jewellery industry. That gemmology is inextricably linked with geology is a given, but Amfitheatrof seems truly blown away by it, eyes bright when she tells us how kunzite is one of the oldest known rocks on Earth as she shows off a necklace layering the stones in pink and yellow hues with opals and gold. Or that 145-million-year-old ammonites are formed by a creature that grows out of its shell bit by bit, sealing up the piece it just left “like people in Manhattan moving to a bigger apartment”.
The ammonites and meteorites (and 18th-century Chinese crystal balls, Bronze Age slingshots and a fossilised elephant bird egg) that act as props for Deep Time’s so-called Life act – which comes after the first act, named Geology – were curated by the antiques collector and dealer Emma Hawkins, and are a fascinating foil for the glinting diamonds, juicy cabochon rubellites and enormous opals set in precious metal that make up the act.
A 3rd-century marble hand from ancient Rome may look incredibly old, especially when displayed underneath a sweeping high jewellery necklace of sapphires and diamonds, opals and paraiba tourmalines, but when you realise that the materials in that necklace are epochs older than that dislocated hand, you realise how incredible the cutting, polishing and setting techniques that create such pieces from raw materials are. And the design, of course.
Deep Time is perhaps Louis Vuitton’s most brand-iconography-laden high jewellery collection yet. There are diamonds cut in the house’s monogram flower cut strewn between rubies and emeralds or plunging from diamond necklaces, L and V initials picked out in diamonds, and myriad nods to their shapes across the board. One ring and pendant pairing is nothing less than the monogram flower in 3D; layers of diamond, ruby and pink sapphires creating a bold Louis Vuitton icon in precious form. Somehow, however, all that bold iconography is less obvious by being placed in such extreme shapes, sizes and colour combinations. The Wave necklace, for example, sports a D-flawless monogram-flower-cut diamond, but that’s hardly stealing the show from the exceptional 40.8-carat oval-cut sapphire it suspends, or the fact that the necklace itself is a superbly wrought, curving collar of diamonds crashing from the neck like an actual wave.