Bamboo, glass, aluminum — these are not the materials you traditionally associate with high-quality jewelry, but there are designers dotted around the world exploring radical alternatives to the precious metals we’re used to. Trying out different materials gives these innovators greater creative freedom and delivers some spectacularly original results, be it the gem-set crushed-metal effects of Suzanne Syz’s aluminum jewelry, or the realism of a water drop frozen in glass and diamonds by Beau Han Xu.
Italian jeweler Fabio Salini is setting pearls and gemstones in black carbon fiber, while Hong Kong-based artist Wallace Chan spent seven years developing a porcelain that is as hard as nails for his sculpted jewels. And New York-based James de Givenchy, the designer behind Taffin, is constantly working on new hybrids of ceramic to expand his repertoire.
Changing color: Titanium, aluminum and ceramic
Titanium has been a part of the jewelry vocabulary for a number of years. Its durability, strength, lightness, and ability to adopt a rainbow of colors when heated have changed people’s perceptions and expectations of color
in jewelry.
Suzanne Syz is a fan. She has also worked with aluminum for the past five years and loves the opportunities it brings to her designs. The two metals “are so light that you can work on a big scale without making the piece [of jewelry] uncomfortable,” she says. “I feel totally free within all my creations. It has allowed me to create pieces I could never have done with gold or platinum.”
Versatile and malleable, aluminum can achieve intricate and delicate designs or bold, avant-garde shapes like the metal cuffs and earrings in Syz’s current Crushed for You collection. And as with titanium, applying high levels of heat changes the metal’s color.
Indeed, color is one of the main advantages that aluminum, titanium and ceramic bring to the table. Unlike precious metals, these materials provide limitless possibilities for matching and contrasting with gemstones.
Art jeweler Cindy Chao uses titanium in her large sculpted statement brooches for this reason, as well as for its lightness. She used aluminum for the first time in her new Black Label Masterpiece Butterfly, Aurora, because the red of the anodized metal was more saturated than titanium could achieve. She set four Burmese rubies in the red aluminum for the body, and diamonds and sapphires in blue titanium for the wings.
Taffin’s de Givenchy, meanwhile, makes gemstones the heroes of his pieces through intense color combinations with his ceramic settings. The effect is bold, vivid and eye-catching; he might combine an old mine-cut gemstone with a smooth-finished, ultra-modern colored ceramic frame. There is also the play of texture between the smooth setting and the tactile facets of the gem.
Beyond gold: Steel, zirconium and iron
Design is about challenging preconceived ideas of what is precious and what isn’t. A material may be humble, but a combination of fine craftsmanship and precious gems elevates the status of that material to luxury.
Bulgari has been doing this since the 1980s, when the jeweler combined gold and diamonds with steel in its Tubogas collection.
“We were the first to use diamonds and steel together,” says Bulgari creative director Lucia Silvestri. “Using different materials is part of our DNA. We were experimenting with ceramic in the 1990s, [and later] titanium and zirconium.”
Zirconium recently appeared in the jeweler’s Cinemagia collection. The lustrous grey-white metal is similar to titanium in its chemical and physical properties, though it is better known for its nuclear-energy applications. In Cinemagia, Bulgari used it in a choker and bracelet that emulate a roll of celluloid film. “We research a lot and like to find new metals, new stones, new materials,” Silvestri says.
German jewelry house Hemmerle also has a reputation for experimenting. Back in 1995, Stefan Hemmerle — who runs the business with his family — challenged convention by setting a diamond in iron (although Berlin iron was popular in Prussia in the early 19th century). In 2016, his son Christian introduced a gem-set series of earrings and a brooch in anodized aluminum.
Hard work: Carbon fiber and porcelain
Designing with unusual materials does come with challenges. Titanium is difficult to master. So is carbon fiber, according to Fabio Salini, who has begun using it as an alternative to ebony. He has long loved the dramatic contrast between the darkness of ebony and the sparkle of diamonds and colored stones. Ebony is hard but fragile, while carbon is strong but tricky.
“Carbon appears in nature in very thin, charcoal-grey fibers which look like hairs,” explains Salini. “For this reason, it is very difficult to shape it before making it solid. Once solid, the material is very resistant, and so the difficulty is to shape it as close as possible to the final volume, as when solid, it is very hard to sculpt and polish.” Once the structure is ready, gemstones and pearls are set in a base of gold, which is then inlaid in the carbon. “This technique is quite complicated, too, making the labor of carbon jewelry pieces quite expensive.”
Still, carbon fiber allows for much lighter, stronger and detailed pieces. In the beginning, Salini recalls, “I used to polish it to a matte finish, very similar to ebony. Only through the years and [after] becoming more confident with this material, I discovered — and then decided to reveal and enrich — its beautiful and intriguing silky metallic texture.”
Porcelain, normally reserved for tea sets and figurines, is another challenging material due to its fragility. Bulgari used porcelain in its Chandra collection in 1994, but it was largely absent in high jewelry until Wallace Chan’s experiments delivered a porcelain that was five times harder than steel. This durable material has featured in about 20 designs, most recently in a necklace and a brooch the designer showcased at the TEFAF Maastricht fair.
A secret recipe and two custom-built German kilns that heat to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit produce a strong porcelain, but that isn’t the end of it. “The material has to be repeatedly carved and fired before it is transformed into the ideal shape,” says Chan. “There is shrinkage in the firing process, so every step must be closely monitored for the porcelain parts to fit with other parts (the gemstones and titanium in which they are set).... I cannot use molds to create the shapes I want, which are often highly complex.”
Forces of nature: Glass and wood
One would imagine that glass is as vulnerable as porcelain, but Beau Han Xu, who studied glassblowing alongside goldsmithing and jewelry at London’s Royal College of Art, has been working with artisans to make something more durable, audacious and far from conventional. “I have invented new ingredients to add to the existing crystal compound, and this makes the crystal more robust, as well as enhancing [its] clarity,” explains Xu. “I have also added different ingredients to change the color tone of the crystal.” The resulting material is light, smooth and shiny.
He debuted his Splash couture collection in 2016, adding more pieces recently. Using the free forms created in glassblowing studios in London and Stuttgart, Germany, the collection’s collars, cuffs and earrings replicate splashes of water frozen in time. It is a dynamic process: Xu guides the glassblowers in the studio, and at a certain point in the process, he pours diamonds and a patented liquid into the glass, which is then sealed so that the diamonds swim inside it.
Then there’s wood, a material from which our ancestors made jewelry. Today, it is a favorite of Taffin and Silvia Furmanovich, both of which use fine veneers and marquetry to frame precious gems. This autumn, Furmanovich is adding another natural material to her repertoire: bamboo. “I have fallen in love with bamboo, but it is very difficult to work with,” she admits. “I met craftsmen in Japan who have spent generations learning the skill, and am inspired by the way the artisans elevate intricately woven objects from craft level to art form.”
The skill is a specialty of the area around Beppu, on the island of Kyushu, and she has collaborated with masters there on a series of jewels that combine bamboo with 18-karat gold, precious gems and diamonds. “Bamboo is unique for its resilience, flexibility, durability and steadfastness,” she says. In addition, there is a strong sustainability dimension to the collection, as bamboo is farmed and fast-growing — another example of how modern designers are thinking outside the box.
Images: Beau Han Xu; BulgariArticle from the Rapaport Magazine - July 2020. To subscribe click here.