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ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements launches GEM VISIONS 2010
LUXURY REDEFINED - CREATIVITY OUT OF CHAOS
ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements launches GEM VISIONS 2010 – the pioneering, profound and provocative trend and design book that leads the way forward for fine jewellery.
CHAOS: CRISIS OR OPPORTUNITY?
For 2010 Gem Visions examines the crucial questions and challenges facing the luxury industry in the year ahead. With a dynamic new design, more inspirational and informative than ever, Gem Visions explores new creativity and defines the design directions emerging from the current chaos of crisis and change.
ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements, Swarovski’s world-leading product brand for precision-cut genuine gemstones and created stones, presents GEM VISIONS 2010, a new, bolder edition of its highly-acclaimed and much anticipated trend and design book, expertly researched and specifically targeted at the fine jewellery market.
Over the years, GEM VISIONS has grown to be an unrivalled and indispensable resource for the global jewellery industry. This year as always, led by an international team of world-renowned trend and jewellery experts, GEM VISIONS digs deep into the cultural fabric of our moment to identify and analyse socio-cultural megatrends and four major design directions most likely to influence fine jewellery in the year ahead. GEM VISIONS aims at stimulating creativity and originality in both design and manufacture, propelling the fine jewellery industry into the future. At the same time it draws on Swarovski’s supreme mastery of precision-cutting and dedication to innovation and perfection, to interpret the forthcoming trends through a palette of intriguing, barrier-breaking, fashion-focused gemstone products, all with their amazing signature consistency of quality, colour and cut. GEM VISIONS takes gems and jewels into the wider world of today’s most vital fashion and lifestyle trends, showing the gemstone as an essential ingredient of style. For 2010, the GEM VISIONS book, moves onto a new level of creativity in its own right, focused, and filled with inspirations, insights and information. The unfolding trends are illuminated by images of jewels specially commissioned by ENLIGHTENED™ - Swarovski Elements. Talented designers, from around the world, have been invited to interpret the four new directions using the newest ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements products.
New to GEM VISIONS 2010 are the enriching results of special projects initiated by ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements working with designers in different disciplines around the world, throwing new light on gemstones, giving them new relevance in today’s world. Kristin Hanson, jeweler and founder of the Kristin Hanson Jewelry School in New York elaborates on the Gem Visions overriding theme of chaos, praising its magnetic life force, the beauty of unpredictability, the “treasures of the chaotic mind”. She and her students set out to express the energy of chaos through new and original designs, now illustrating the Pure Chaos direction. Chinese-born graphic designer Yang Liu lived and studied for many years in Germany, so that her book “East Meets West” reflects the distance between these countries and cultures and her personal experience of them both. For Gem Visions’s Divine Chimeras theme, Yang Liu reworked her celebrated red and blue graphic images to incorporate ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements, as she says, bringing the countries closer and enlightening their cultural differences. Austrian architect and designer Florian Baptist Gypser lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand where he extensively researches and designs ground-breaking contemporary furniture. For GEM VISIONS 2010, taking the same East meets West theme, he shares with us his radical vision for Bangkok Spine, a series of 12 inhabitable bridges, a project inspired by historic relationships between the east and west riverbanks, the juxtaposition of buildings and streets with the river, urban and organic, and futuristic public transportation that will open up previously neglected areas to the west of the Chao Phraya, the river of kings.
GEM VISIONS 2010
While the backdrop for GEM VISIONS 2010 remains nature, and concern for the environment, the key word and connecting theme is chaos, reflecting economic and social turbulence and its ongoing effects, the inevitable sea-change in global lifestyles and consumer attitudes. Everywhere people reexamine their aims, priorities and values. Questions run through all four design directions. What’s next? Is Chaos the new Romanticism? Slow food, slow design, slow jewellery? Global icons versus local identity? What are the new expressions of rarity? The jewellery industry, so overgrown in recent years, retreats into its original core values, going back to the very essence of the jewel. By 2010, the first green shoots of a new creative dynamism, fresh and strong, and a new way of being, emerge from the chaos. The story of creation.
The four design directions identified for 2010 are:
False Nudity, Oversized Games, Pure Chaos, Divine Chimeras
FALSE NUDITY: An ingenious yet ageless jewel
False Nudity, with its pale shifting veil of beauty, its restful less-is-more philosophy and its zen luxury, is enriched with a touch of mystery and hints of hidden treasures. Floating, ultra-light, airy designs express an essential purity countered by the complexity
of breathtaking, minute detail. Pearlescence is strong, along with rugged textured gold and layers of transparency. For the unconventional, no-logo generation, this is “slow” design underpinned with contemporary artistry. A sweet and sour colour range of veiled and milky pastels, hovers between pale olive greens and sweet sugar-almond tones, punctuated by salmon pink and deep powder blue. Key concepts include: emptiness, ethereal, fluidity, natural, cage, stylization, skeleton, organic, functional. Illustrating False Nudity, Swarovski has created the Geranium Ring, embedding a white Cubic Zirconia stone inside Swarovski crystal, its organic shape framed in layers of ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements Genuine Rhodolite, and intensified with enamel. From Brazil, Silvania conjures up long drop earrings of open hoops and organic forms, paved in the round in ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements, Genuine Pink Sapphire, Passion Topaz, Infinite Blue and Complexion.
OVERSIZED GAMES: A neo-materialist yet informal jewel
Oversized Games, with its gigantic, theatrical stylization of nature, and its extravagantly sculptural forms, combines powerful architectural energy with supernatural romance. Playing provocatively and excessively with volumes and proportions, colour and light, Oversized Games expresses the optimism of the Obama era and a new mood of dynamic minimal-modernism infused with cultural elements and made possible by cutting-edge technology. Design conscious consumers choose these neo-materialistic jewels to make strong, personal statements. Colours speak of urban nature, shocking, acidic and definite, cold, concrete neutrals lit by flashes of brilliance and new blues and grass greens. Techniques and materials feature coloured titanium, carved gemstones, new ceramics, huge chunks of minerals and laser cut and faceted metals. Key concepts include modern art, typography, sculpture, sturdy, geometry, optical, improbable, hugeness and 3-D. Roberto Marroni paves massive, organically shaped rings with intensely shaded ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements, Genuine Pink Sapphire and Spessartite lit by diamonds. For his attention-grabbing cocktail ring, Brazilian designer Marco Marchese, for Art’Orafo, encases a green chalcedony in a massive gold box, pierced and punctuated with a grid of ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements Genuine Black Spinels.
PURE CHAOS: A sophisticated yet anarchical jewel
Reaching into the heart of 2010 aesthetics, developing, Pure Chaos introduces a new romanticism, with its free-falling, tumbling abundance. It represents a search for the unknown and expresses the radical change in world order and our sense of self. New beauty and modern baroque comes from a proliferation of jumbled upcycled elements, from chaotic draperies, random imperfections in stones and metals. At the heart of chaos is a relic, an amulet, a fragment of the past, symbol of the ever-spiraling march of time. This is the chaos of the clash of cultures, and consumers experience a return to a cerebral complexity, with a mania for layers, for collecting. Rather than a specific colour range, this is about all or nothing, shades of monochrome or riotous multi-colours. Chaos is reflected in materials and techniques, in spun metal, distorted metallic finishes, unpredictable molten metals. Key concepts include explosion, nervousness, bric a brac, frightening, energy, crash, split, disorganization, diffraction, collage. Pandora jewellery from Denmark mixes silver and wood with ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements in various colours. In Greece Fanourakis creates a madly chaotic necklace, spiraling out of control, clipped with fearsome barbed wire motifs.
DIVINE CHIMERAS: A luxurious yet subversive jewel
With its archetypal figural imagery, Divine Chimeras cross-fertilises the personal character of Precious Me with the audacity of HyperNature bringing a new, magical, mystical direction to the age-old spirituality that is the soul of the jewel. The modern chimera is not demonic but dreamlike, daring, magical and fun. With its unexpected, mismatched inspirations, motifs and materials, its marriages of opposites, this is the trend that searches for the strongest possible expression of personal identity. Consumers look for an element of fantasy and escapism in this trend that reflects cultural fusion and the hybrid elements of everyday life. The “hot shock” colours comprise a range of sharp contrasts, focusing on hot orange, reds and corals, flirting with dark, natural opaque shades of anthracite and browns, with a strong ethnic flavor. Steely minerals like marcasite or hematite exude a futuristic gleam, while other metals are given an age-old patina or oxidization. Minerals are rough and rugged, painted metals look magical, all surfaces are transformed beyond recognition. Key concepts include esoteric, errors of style, substitution, game, subversive, audacity, nostalgia, neo-primitive, historical. Celebrated Indian designer-jeweller, Farah Khan fashions a knot of eternity, hung with a pearl, using ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements, genuine ruby contrasted with marcasite and topped with a circle of life, composed of the new Trilight cut in Passion Topaz Ice Blue. Delphine Bagot for Bermudes in France creates a cuff of disintegrated blackened metal contrasting with black lace and shimmering unexpected accents of ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements diamond pre-settings.
ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements New Product Collection
With its wealth of richness, and the depth of its new intriguing directions, GEM VISIONS 2010 suggests the most appropriate genuine gemstones and created stones to bring each of the four complex design directions to life, this year offering the possibility of ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements vintage cuts, on request. At the same time, as ever, GEM VISIONS introduces the season’s dazzling new gem products. While ENLIGHTENED™ – Swarovski Elements boasts an inspirational range of colours, textures and translucencies, from sumptuous to subtle, classic to contemporary, the emphasis this year is very much on new cuts, maximizing Swarovski’s unrivalled skills in precision-cutting and its continual pursuit of innovation, through artistry, artisanship and technology.
New in the Genuine Gemstones group is Trilight, a scintillating triangle, speaking of the mysticism and sacred geometry that features through GEM VISIONS 2010. Trilight draws strength from contrasts, balancing refined, floating femininity with strong, stark geometry. In its complex arrangement of facets and reflections, cubes, circles and triangles are recast in multiple layers, juxtaposing depth and density with infinite lightness.
Several new cuts and shapes are available in Created Stones. Chaos, capturing the essence of GEM VISIONS 2010, is both crazy and controlled, its inner energy struggling against a classical framework, composing an intriguing and unexpected harmony. This new gemstone that shows Swarovski’s cutting prowess to perfection, is ideal for traditional techniques and for designs that challenge the conventional boundaries of design.
Eyefraction is an emotive and elegant eye-shaped form, soft and fluid, yet minimal and sleek with more than a touch of classicism. The facets, painstakingly planned, have been immaculately cut to maximize light reflection and create a rhythmic sense of movement. Eyefraction can be used individually or in clusters and compositions producing a compelling magnetism.
ZenNeo is a dynamic, sculptural form alive with energy. The asymmetry of its contours gives the gemstone a strong organic flavour. Sensual and curvaceous, the gently rippling lines of its intriguing facets wrap around its elongated silhouette. Light and fresh, in tune with nature, ZenNeo is destined to become a contemporary design classic.
Fancy Babies (Marquise, pear, oval)
Paying homage to the most classic and conventional gemstone cuts, the trio of Fancy Babies reaches iconic perfection in terms of proportion, shape, clarity and brilliance, and breathes new life into timeless jewellery traditions. The stones can be set one shape at a time, or mixed and matched to create textural effects with a youthful sense of movement. Fancy Babies fuse the lovingly familiar with a playful surprise to produce poetic, fun-filled drops of light and life.
