Through The Looking Glass

Created to magnify the beauty and poignancy of an era of great change and burgeoning luxury, Louis Vuitton reveals a high jewellery collection quite unlike any other

- ALISSA THOMAS

It was an era of designated beauty. When the destitution of a prior wartime was revoked then replaced with a cultural revolution. La Belle Époque, the label given to late 19th Century France was a period that garnered grand design, great architecture and industrial expansion. Manifesting in Paris, it flourished throughout Europe, brandishing an artistic intelligentsia that remains today. It was catapulted by the completion of the Eiffel Tower and celebrated through an explosion of artistic forms that came to be known as Art Nouveau - New Art. Forging into an unbridled future was the new resistance, when fine arts spilled from the canvases of the masters into the tangible and the everyday. When every corner of the man-made world had the potential to become art in itself.