How do you measure a body of work? For much of the jewelry world, it’s a hard question to answer. Archives are just the tip of the iceberg: sketches and gouaches (realistic painted renderings of jewelry developed ahead of their creation) are limitless, and personal collections often span the globe and can be hard to track. For Van Cleef Arpels, a historic French jewelry house, the answer is nebulous, but they’re making a good attempt to document it with a duo of anthologies. The first of the books, The Van Cleef Arpels Collection, published last month, focuses on jewels, precious objects, and watchmaking pieces from 1906 to 1953.
Beyond simply highlighting sketches and imagery of the jewelry pieces, the new Van Cleef Arpels book situates many of the pieces in context through fashion photography, portraits of them worn, and vintage advertisements. Amid the pages of the first volume, the reader experiences the magnitude of pieces (700 to be exact) through new lenses, such as art history, world history, and culture. One of these lenses is Vogue photography.
When looking at the Vogue archives to write this story, it became clear that the collection of photographs of the jewelry of Van Cleef Arpels that have appeared in the pages of Vogue over the decades is immense (and perhaps worthy of their own book).
Below, we delve deeper into some of the magnificent pieces featured.
The color combinations in the Vogue cover from December 1951 are echoed in this supple diamond and sapphire cravat-style necklace that moves in similar fashion to an actual scarf.
Always ones to push boundaries in their design atelier, Van Cleef Arpels created this set—and subsequent designs—inspired by sequins used in couture. The individual gold concave and convex discs are studded with diamonds. It’s shown here on the April 1956 cover of Vogue with two models in red dresses and embellished hats.
This diamond and sapphire brooch shown in a Vogue image in 1937 is large in size—realistically life-size, really. The piece shows the house’s interest in naturalistic interpretation and also adeptness in versatility; one of the flowers can be removed at the stalk.