At New York Fashion Week in September, Fendi celebrated the twenty fifth anniversary of its best-selling Baguette bag with a stunning ready-to-wear present designed by Kim Jones and Marc Jacobs, a entrance row stacked with celebrities together with Kim Kardashian and Sarah Jessica Parker, and a few Tiffany & Co diamonds.
Fendi and Tiffany, each of that are owned by LVMH, collaborated on a limited-edition bag in robin-egg-blue crocodile leather-based with a diamond-studded clasp combining their initials. The bag was a headline-grabbing quantity that additionally underlined the rising urge for food for prime jewelry baggage. (High jewelry is the jewellers’ equal of high fashion, showcasing uncommon gems in elaborate one-of-a-kind creations.)
“Since Tiffany is an institution in New York, the show was the perfect occasion to see the baguette reinterpreted through their lenses, without losing the bag’s identity,” Silvia Venturini Fendi, the model’s creative director of equipment and menswear, wrote in an electronic mail.
Fendi is under no circumstances the primary style home to launch a excessive jewelry bag. Dior launched its first bejewelled purses in 2019, co-designed by Dior’s Joaillerie artistic director Victoire de Castellane and creative director of girls’s style Maria Grazia Chiuri.
Given that leather-based equipment and jewelry are among the many best-performing classes within the luxurious items sector, there’s a logic to combining them in a single product. Accessories and jewelry introduced in €62bn and €22bn respectively in 2021, a rise of 8 per cent and seven per cent on 2019, in line with Bain.
“Handbag collectors love a piece that integrates both leather goods of the highest order and jewellery,” says Morgane Halimi, Sotheby’s head of purses and equipment. She cites Hermès’s bejewelled purses as essentially the most sought-after items on the secondary market.
Bejewelled baggage have an extended historical past. Cartier started crafting purses originally of the twentieth century beneath the supervision of muse/creative director Jeanne Toussaint, and has since launched an array of fashions, starting from bejewelled clutches with six-figure worth tags to extra accessible leather-based baggage such because the Must de Cartier (from £1,070) and the brand new Panthère de Cartier (beginning at £2,470).
Nowadays, Cartier produces a small variety of one-of-a-kind excessive jewelry baggage a 12 months, fusing the home’s jewelry experience with high fashion strategies. For instance, this 12 months’s Mosaic Snake bag incorporates a feather marquetry surrounding a snake jewelry piece set with diamonds, onyx, sapphires and tourmalines. In one other excessive jewelry bag, a diamond-studded panther with onyx spots lies languidly on a 2.51-carat hearth opal, in opposition to an evening panorama given depth by means of layers of lacquer.
Van Cleef & Arpels’ extremely collectable minaudières have been first launched within the Thirties, and the home nonetheless produces them on request. It all started when Charles Arpels encountered the trendy Florence Gould, daughter-in-law of the American railroad magnate Jay Gould, carrying a nondescript metallic field as a handbag. Horrified, he resolved to create an ingenious 3D space-efficient jigsaw for her magnificence necessities.
Today, nearly all jewellers have a line of equipment with some bejewelled parts. Chopard, for instance, has launched baggage in denim and leather-based set with floating gems, malachite and mom of pearl. Pearl specialist Tasaki has a group of leather-based purses designed by artistic director Thakoon Panichgul that includes shoulder straps and handles product of the home’s well-known pearls.
Earlier this 12 months, London-based jeweller Carolina Bucci debuted her first bejewelled clutch, named Woven Wishes, made in collaboration with Lebanese accent model 13BC. Priced at £4,500, the clutch is made to order, “quite simply because the bags take a huge amount of time and effort to make, and we have found that demand has outstripped our ability to make them in time”, explains Bucci.
Bulgari has additionally launched excessive jewelry purses. “The demand and the consequent creation of these beautiful one-of-a-kind jewellery bags have grown over time,” Mireia Lopez Montoya, Bulgari’s managing director of leather-based items and equipment, writes in an electronic mail. Lopez Montoya is referring to the home’s excessive jewelry purses — worth on utility — resembling a current model from the Serpenti assortment in crocodile leather-based, closed with a snake-head-shaped clasp that may be indifferent and worn as a pendant or brooch. “It is a testament to the versatility with which Bulgari has always created jewels that can be worn in different ways,” she says.
But why are collectors drawn to five- or six-figure bejewelled baggage? Singapore-based creator, philanthropist and collector Paige Parker offers some clues. She owns a signed and numbered 18-carat gold mesh clutch by Van Cleef & Arpels with a platinum and diamond scalloped closure, which she makes use of sparingly. “I use the bag on the most special occasions, like an intimate birthday dinner at a friend’s home,” she says. “To me, it’s a work of art and an investment.”
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