Are You Seeing Things?

The designer of a major new jewelry collection wants it that way.

- Stellene Volandes

Jewelry stories don’t often begin in the Arms and Armor Gallery at the Met, but that’s where Francesca Amfitheatrof wants to start.

And so I find myself one Saturday morning face to burgonet with Giovanni Battista Bourbon del Monte, a 16th-century Italian mercenary in good with the emperor, the Pope, and the kings of France and Spain. He had the armor to show for it: etched steel partly gilded and sculpted to imitate rich and heavy brocaded textile. Not far from him is a vitrine holding a masterwork of Filippo Negroli, a 16th-century Milanese master craftsmen who seems to have been something like the JAR of the Italian armor world: innovative, often imitated, revered. The plaques next to the Italian parade armor feature vocabulary familiar to a jewelry writer: embossing, repoussé, chasing, hammered steel, gilt. There is also, alongside the description of the decorative elements of each piece of armor, particular attention paid to how it was worked to allow for freedom of movement, for that, ultimately, was its true power. I can imagine Amfitheatrof, a designer whose work has always been driven by narrative, and also by a sense of modern ease, standing in this gallery in front of a German warrior, sketching a Louis Vuitton diamond necklace.

Vuitton, founded in 1854, introduced jewelry in 2004 and has been creating High Jewelry pieces—one-of-a-kind designs featuring exceptional craftsmanship and rare and extraordinary stones—since 2009. This year’s High Jewelry collection—one has been presented ever year—is called Riders of the Knights and is inspired, according to Vuitton, by “lands of legends and audacity.” It explores “the power of vision that drove several medieval heroines to transcend their status as women in order to forge their own destiny.”