An exclusive look at Fabergé’s first high jewellery collaboration
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Fabergé, the brand behind the famed jewelled Easter eggs, is for the first time teaming up with a featured designer on a new high jewellery collection, launching this September. London-based James Ganh has worked with the house on the capsule collection which, in true Fabergé style, is inspired by nature – with brilliantly hued summer flowers and joyful butterflies. It’s a vision of long, languorous Chekhovian summers spent in a dacha in the Russian countryside.
The collection is the culmination of a year’s graft by Ganh and his team, working in their St James’s atelier. The concept of partnering with a featured designer links to the great Peter Carl Fabergé – goldsmith to the Russian Imperial court and creator of the house’s eggs – who had his own pioneering system of collaborating with named “workmasters”, each with his or her own craft speciality and artistic style. Different works of art would be assigned to different workmasters, according to the specifications, techniques and style, while Fabergé himself directed, supervised and oversaw the process of creating and crafting each jewel or object.
Ganh, a graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins, established his own brand in 2014 after working at Fabergé for almost two years. He calls himself a “jewel-engineer” and his love of construction, articulation and transformable jewels is played out in this inaugural collaborative collection – many of the complex creations can be taken apart and reassembled to be worn in different ways. Through this ingenuity, Ganh has infused the collection with a sense of anticipation, a subtle reference to the treasures famously hidden inside the house’s Imperial Easter eggs. “The romantic and loving surprises of Fabergé creations spoke to my heart and inspired my work,” he says.
While some models in the capsule are elegantly classic – draped collars and diamond earrings with emeralds and rubies, in homage to the splendour of Imperial Russian jewels – others are more whimsical: drop earrings of coloured sapphires or butterflies with shades of green, combining emeralds and tsavorites. The designer’s love of colour, an echo perhaps of Fabergé’s unrivalled enamels, is demonstrated too in his exploration of gemstones, from hypnotic amethyst and majestic tanzanite to pink tourmalines and rose quartz beads. His use of carved turquoise for a dramatic floral ring, and a suite of sumptuous rubies inset into blush-pink opal, tells of Fabergé’s legendary skills in stone carving – a truly Russian art form.
In all, the James Ganh x Fabergé collection offers a new, individualistic expression of the house’s modern-day credo, “A Life in Colour”. The collection will be on view and on sale at Fabergé in Harrods, The Galleria in Houston and the Dubai Mall from 1 September. Prices per set range from $74,100 to $1,150,500, and individual pieces up to $317,460.
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