How a Tiffany Bracelet Is Made

T Magazine|How a Tiffany Bracelet Is Made

Jean Schlumberger, a Tiffany & Co. designer for three decades beginning in 1956, had a talent for translating flora and sea creatures into eccentric jewelry. “I saw nature and I found verve,” he once said of his work, whose admirers included Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor and the Duchess of Windsor. In 1965, when the fashion writer Eugenia Sheppard and others gathered for the unveiling of his latest brooch — a diamond-encrusted platinum-and-18-karat gold cockatoo perched on a comically large topaz — some responded with delighted laughter. The horticulturalist Rachel “Bunny” Mellon was among the first to acquire one (in her case, the perch was a cabochon lapis lazuli). By 1995, eight years after Schlumberger’s death at age 80, the brooch had become so iconic that the house created a version with the nearly 129-carat yellow Tiffany Diamond, timed to the designer’s retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Now, two years after Tiffany & Co. built an entire collection around Bird on a Rock, the line expands once again — this time with pieces that veer into abstraction. The Wings bracelet, with a repeating feather motif, embraces Schlumberger’s back catalog of avian designs. “Ideas come to me at pencil point,” Schlumberger said. So, Tiffany’s chief artistic officer, Nathalie Verdeille, began her research at the company’s archives in New Jersey, where she often looks over drafts and original settings firsthand. Her design team then shared two- and three-dimensional sketches with engineers and master craftspeople at the brand’s Jewelry and Design Innovation Workshop, which opened in 2018 in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. There the drawings were translated into resin or metal maquettes, and later into final prototypes. In either platinum or rose gold, the hinged Wings bracelet, which requires more than 50 hours to make, features delicate engraving and 261 diamonds of varying sizes, arranged in a cobblestone pattern that evokes ruffled feathers. The effect on the wrist is refined yet playful, a reminder, even in an age of technological supremacy, to enjoy the simple pleasures of nature.