Cranes In The Sky

As Danish jeweller (by royal appointment) Ole Lynggaard celebrates his 83rd birthday, BAZAAR is given rare access to the patriarch. He opens up to Grace O’Neill about his brand’s next chapter

- Grace O’Neill

Ole Lynggaard is not a man who rushes things. He speaks in slow, purposeful sentences (his English is perfect, but it takes him a few goes to decipher my very Aussie pronunciation of “Helena Christensen”) and is thoughtful about every word, which is why it’s not so surprising that it has taken him years to release a new collection for his namesake label. Cranes, which launches in Australia this month, has, in one sense, been in the works for decades. “I first began thinking about this collection three years ago, but my fascination with cranes dates back further than that,” he says, “back to when I was in my twenties and spent a great time in Japan — the culture fascinates me.”

The long lead time is a reflection of Lynggaard’s perfectionism. He insisted on specific machinations mimicking the movements of cranes in flight and at rest, and spent years going back and forth with the design team until he deemed the prototypes to be perfect. “Cranes stand on one foot and lift their wings on a very specific angle, and we needed to reflect this in the jewellery,” he says. “We said ‘No, it’s not good enough’ a lot of times.”