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Last week, famous French jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels unveiled their new high jewelry collection, Sous Les Étoiles, during Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week. It’s a magnificent exploration of the wonders of the stars, sky, and galaxies near and far with 150 jaw-dropping works of art in everything from dramatic necklaces to watches.
Celestial phenomena have always fascinated the creators of Van Cleef & Arpels, from the start. In 1907, the sale of a star-shaped pearl and diamond brooch was mentioned in one of the house’s earliest accounting books.
It has been around ten years since VCA last turned to points of celestial inspiration, with Les Voyages Extraordinaires 2010, which was inspired by the themes of four novels by Jules Verne including From the Earth to the Moon (From the Earth to the Moon). Sous Les Étoiles is meant to be a continuation of the house’s odyssey through space and time, as she seeks increasingly difficult and infinitely intriguing sources to inform her designs.
“The house has always been interested in the moment when the observation of nature meets poetry and the imagination,” explains Nicolas Bos, Chairman and CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels. “For this new collection, we wanted to extend the adventure started with Jules Verne, by exploring the literary and scientific tradition of which his work is inscribed. This led us to the classic author Lucian of Samosate imagining a trip to space, to Johannes Kepler and his inspirational text The dream, Where Lunar astronomy—written at the beginning of the 17th century – and to Camille Flammarion, who published his wonderfully illustrated book Popular astronomy in 1880.
A variety of astronomical entities and phenomena – and key pieces from the house’s archives – lend their unique shapes to the jewelry. The necklace below is a tribute to Halley’s Comet, visible from Earth every 75 years. Representing the head of the comet, usually formed of ice, gas, and dust, is a fancy bright yellow antique diamond trailing rays of white and yellow diamonds in glorious blaze. True to the tradition of the house’s transformable pieces, the central yellow diamond can be removed and set in a ring with a similar design.

An oval cut yellow buttercup sapphire from Sri Lanka weighing over 50 cts. replaces the sun in the Helios necklace below.

The spiral-shaped Antennae galaxies that collide with each other and mix their stars and nebulae just 45 million light years from Earth are captured in a remarkable reversible collar.
Inspired by pieces created by Van Cleef & Arpels between the 1930s and 1950s, one side conceals a diamond and blue sapphire buckle under a sparkling knot clasp at the front.

When the reverse of. the collar is worn, the knot is made in the back. It took more than two years for the gemologists at Van Cleef & Arpels to assemble the remarkable sapphires of the design, which range from pale pink to intense purple.

Here are some other highlights from this spectacular rhapsody on the cosmos, including a tribute to the Milky Way and a timepiece featuring a Christiaan van der Klaauw planetarium module (a planetarium is a complication that shows the relative position of the solar system. around the sun, given the different orbit speeds of its planets).



Top: Céphéide earrings in 18k white gold with removable pendants of 11.89 cts. two baguette-cut tanzanites, tsavorite garnets, purple sapphires and diamonds
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