Treasures Through Time: Jessica Chastain's New Journey with Gucci

Celebrated actress and film producer Jessica Chastain takes on a new journey with Gucci as she stars in Hortus Deliciarum, the brand’s latest high jewellery campaign

There are many faces in Hollywood, but none quite like the award-winning Jessica Chastain. On-screen, she is known for playing strong characters such as Lady Lucille Sharpe in Crimson Peak, Murph in Interstellar, Ava Faulkner in Ava, and Molly Bloom in Molly’s Game.

Off-screen and away from the limelight, Chastain proves she’s just as powerful as the women she portrays, as she is known for being vocal about her feminist stands including shattering gender stereotypes, supporting the abolishment of the gender-based pay gap and more.

Chastain’s personality is one of the many reasons why she is the star of Gucci’s latest collection. The luxury brand seeks to find a character that emanates elegance, power and eccentricity—traits that the actress pictures effortlessly.

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Above Celebrated actress and film producer Jessica Chastain takes on a new journey with Gucci as she stars in Hortus Deliciarum, the brand’s latest high jewellery campaign

Gucci’s high jewellery collection, Hortus Deliciarum, features unique and empowering pieces, a creative ode to specific historical and architectural eras suspended in time and space. In this campaign, the actress is featured in a series of photographs and a dedicated film. Hortus Deliciarum, which is Latin for “Garden of Delights”, draws on the symbolic motifs that are dear to Alessandro Michele and the House of Gucci. It also represents the mementoes Chastain’s character has accumulated throughout her life travels.

Bringing a contemporary edge to the timeless nature of the past, Chastain successfully rekindles the extraordinary moments of her life and channels them into the Hortus Deliciarum collection. In this project, she works with collaborative photographers Mert and Marcus and Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, who is also responsible for designing the stunning pieces.

The beloved Oscar-winning star graces the cameras wearing precious gemstones in a variety of colours including red, blue, green and pink. She is also seen wearing a ruffled purple dress while posing with a green pendant necklace. In some pictures, Chastain dons a blue and gold gown paired with a multi-coloured necklace and bracelet that includes a sparkling micro-mosaic.

The film, on the other hand, is vivid and cinematic. It reveals a succession of different scenes, with the decoration of each room representing some of the most interesting phases in the rich personal history of Chastain. Altogether, the film and its accompanying images possess a voyeuristic, intimate quality, combining tightly shot portraits with atmospheric wider shots to reveal hints of the celebrity’s unpredictability. Eye-catching and versatile, the Hortus Deliciarum includes a set of unique micro-mosaic pieces, made between 1850 and 1870.

It also boasts necklaces, bracelets, earrings, brooches, gold pendants holding sparkling peridot, yellow beryl, red and pink spinel, blue topaz, fire opal, pink tourmaline and colourful diamonds.

The collection will also feature products that are dedicated to the Thirties and Forties. Here, Michele highlights modernism through necklaces and bracelets with geometric shapes in chains with asymmetrical, flexible modules. The flexible chains are adorned with amethyst, aquamarine and cushion-cut blue-grey beryl, which replicate their splendour in earrings or central pendants set in cages of baguette-cut diamonds. Lastly, the collection shows the Seventies pop culture through psychedelic colours for necklaces, white gold chains, diamonds holding real talismans in hexagonal emerald, pear-shaped green tourmaline, and aquamarine set in a green enamel frame enclosed by baguette-cut diamonds.

On this path of dreamlike, imaginary journeys, Gucci moves from the magnetic attraction of small micro-mosaics of Roman landscapes to precious stones, colourful and uneven, as an expression of its diversity. Thus, a fairy-tale world is formed, in which the creative director immerses himself in the will of a traveller who wants to know and study the world that is taking shape right before his eyes.

This collection is a creative method that allows the luxury house to recreate the splendour of a real journey, documented and chronicled in the expression of an imaginary personal voyage that Michele dreamed of and recounted himself.

For Gucci, the latest Hortus Deliciarum presents itself as an enlightening chapter of a travel diary. It materialises souvenirs in the form of jewellery; it encapsulates the brand’s adventurous undertaking through bedazzling pieces that celebrate an extraordinary path through a precious world composed of mythical continents and themes. Balancing artful, psychedelic elegance with edgy, contemporary notes, the campaign deftly juxtaposes the past, present and future.

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Treasures Through Time: Jessica Chastain's New Journey with Gucci