Thanks to his fantastical and deeply spirited designs, Nicolas Bos has become one of jewellery’s hottest creative directors, with numerous collections under his belt and a Hong Kong-based exhibition well underway. The downside to all this acclaim: the only time he’s free to speak with me is while doing his children’s morning school run.
Well rested after two weeks of family time in Italy, the 50-year-old CEO and creative director, who works from Van Cleef’s historic Place Vendôme workshop in Paris, video calls me from his car—his children visible in the back seat— ahead of the maison’s Enchanting Garden installation, which ran from September 7 to 15 at Pedder Building in Central and showcased heritage pieces from the vaults.
The exhibit focused on the magic of nature, as seen through Van Cleef’s fairytale lens. Nature has been a source of inspiration for the house since the 19th century and Bos dived into the jeweller’s diamond-decked archives to handpick what he considers Van Cleef’s most important depictions of flora and fauna. “For years, artists and craftsmen have been influenced by nature, but what’s interesting is seeing how these different interpretations evolve from one time period to the next, and how they change from one jeweller to another,” he says.
Other heritage houses recreate wild waterfalls and stylise snakes from cabochon emeralds, but Bos doesn’t succumb to the pressure. “There are so many ways to express nature’s beauty,” he explains, adding he tries to focus on “colour, movement, fragility and asymmetry”, largely avoiding more literal interpretations. He laughs: “We used to say that, at Van Cleef, the real fun was Garden of Eden before the apple, whereas a lot of jewellers concentrate more on what happened after the apple.”
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