Made from non-precious materials and with no reference to the past, these 5 avant-garde jewels are a space where designers Fumiki Taguchi, Shinji Nakaba, Manami Aoki, Mariko Kusumoto, Kazumi Nagano express the delicacy, dexterity and almost obsessive attention to detail of 18th-century craftsmen.

In 2023, the Loewe Foundation Craft prize brought Shinji Nakaba into the spotlight, but this self-taught jewelry designer had in fact been creating jewelry since 1974, when he was 24.

A graduate in Contemporary Jewelry of the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, Marion Delarue respects the classical forms of the Japanese comb and spikes.

Maiko Takeda concentrates mainly on head adornments. Whether with masks, halos or visors, this Japanese designer based in London makes them out of feathers laser-cut from plastic film or acrylic. The color gradations accentuate the transparency, and the play of light and shadow. These head ornaments oscillate between the dandelion flower that disappears in the slightest breeze and the helmet bristling with nerve endings intended for some neuroscientific experiment. Maiko Takeda is passionate about science and loves the minimal, repetitive, obsessive music of Philip Glass.

When I saw the exhibition “Fendre l’air – Art of bamboo in Japan”, I immediately thought of Tina Chow’s jewelry.

Tasaki is the most talked-about jeweler in Japan. Now expanding worldwide, he is opening one store in Great-Britain and one in Paris, where he is also sponsoring the “Japon-Japonismes” exhibition.

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has a collection of over 5,000 necklaces, bracelets, brooches and rings. A thousand of them are presented in two rooms of the gallery des Bijoux. A presentation of the historical part in a video with a commentary by the chief curator, Evelyne Possémé.

Though the name of Henri Vever was eclipsed by René Lalique’s, this Paris jeweler played a key role in Art nouveau.

Alfons Maria Mucha, best known for his advertising posters and decorative designs, also played an essential role in jewelry, notably thanks to his collaboration with the jeweler Georges Fouquet.

This book is a reminder that Alfons Mucha, a major Art Nouveau artist, was sensitive to jewelry. In his decorative paintings women wear plastrons and sophisticated hair ornaments. There are also rings, corset clips and enamel necklaces with arabesques and oriental motifs. The jeweler Georges Fouquet, whose famous serpent runs along the forearm of the actress Sarah Bernhardt in the poster for Medea, made some pieces.

Silk, sculpted and crafted metal, gold … Japanese armor is akin to real ornaments. Jean-Christophe Charbonnier, a world-renowned specialist who provides pieces to leading museums like the Guimet or the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, decrypts it for us.

From international designers, to the underground scene and on to pearl jewelers, Tokyo is a gem.

Elsa Peretti went to Japan for the first time in 1969: there, “the speed and technology of the train going from Tokyo to Kyoto and the traditional know-how particularly marked my creations”. From this came her lacquered bracelets for Tiffany & Co., in Japanese wood renowned for its lightness.

The reopening of the Cartier flagship in Tokyo is a reminder of the ties this French jeweler has had over the years with Japan.

In his new creations, François Garaude has forsaken the gemstones he’s been working with over the past years. He has depicted the famous work by Hokusai, The Wave, in earrings made of titanium, as this material is the only one capable of reproducing the intensity of the Prussian blue, which in 1830, renewed the language of Japanese printmaking.

From the turn of the twentieth century, Cartier has drawn inspiration from Chinese and Japanese objects. The exhibition “L’Asie Rêvée” in the Baur and Cartier collections puts side-by-side 160 of the jeweler’s pieces and objects, and those of the Swiss, Alfred Baur, which mainly come from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). On the theme of the dragonfly, a diamond, ruby and emerald pin from 1953 is found alongside a nineteenth-century lacquered box inlaid with mother-of-pearl and with inrô compartments. A black and white art deco brooch sits beside a cream “soft paste” porcelain seal box. In the display cabinets, luxurious materials echo off the exotic designs and colours with infinite poetry.

Until February 14^th, 2016 at the Baur Foundation, Geneva.