Lifestyle // Women's
How It’s Made: L’École Van Cleef & Arpels
Working with uncut emeralds at L'Ecole Van Cleef & Arpels
Laughter and wax fly out from the worktop where Carole, an expert jeweler, is coaching a student attempting to carve a wax mold. Across the room, master setter Frederic guides another pupil as she manipulates a graver into metal. Meanwhile, jewelry teacher Victoire keeps a watchful eye as I tackle a gouache painting.
It’s just another school day at L’École Van Cleef & Arpels.
L'Ecole in session
Opened in February in the Hôtel d’Évreux, a palatial, eighteenth-century townhouse on the Place Vendôme, L’École Van Cleef & Arpels is the first school of its kind—open to everyone, professionals and amateurs alike, with a passion for jewelry. Seven modules (plans call for 25 within five years) of four hours each span the intellectual to the practical, from jewels in mythology to distinguishing flawed from flawless diamonds.
It’s a rare window into a historically secretive industry and its preciously guarded techniques. Some things, including the surnames of our teachers, remain a secret.
Van Cleef & Arpels brooch, available through Neiman Marcus stores.
For the lesson Admiring Uniqueness and Team Craftsmanship, we step into salons gilded with wallpaper dating to Napoleon III, and into the care of Van Cleef & Arpels jewelers at the highest rank of their profession, known as mains d’or, or golden hands. Save for technical design programs like CAD, their craft is still largely carried out by hand.
In a workshop equipped with workbenches just like those in the house’s Place Vendôme atelier, the class (limited to 12) dons white coats for our half-day apprenticeship.
The uniform
First is a lesson in painting with opaque watercolors, or gouache. Once a drawn design is approved, every jeweler paints his or her own gouache—as lifelike as a photo in detail—to serve as reference for all the craftsmen, from metal-cutters to polishers to setters. “Look at the light on the left-hand side” advises Victoire, a teacher at Paris’s prestigious Rue du Louvre jewelry school, as I attempt to paint light bouncing off an opal diamond-set ring.
After gouache comes another art form: a 3-D hard-wax sculpture to be melted later in a process known as lost wax. I file out the twirling grooves for a dancer’s skirt, a Van Cleef signature. My attempt to saw a line through metal is far from straight. “You took the scenic route,” says Carole consolingly. A silver butterfly brooch, with tiny-holed wings as intricate as a beehive, takes her from 400 to 500 hours to craft.
It’s up to master setter Frederic to fix the precious gems onto the intricate frameworks. The guiding principle, he says, is “Light—it has to circulate throughout.” He demonstrates the bead setting, where a chisel-like tool called a graver is used to lift six slivers of metal over the stone, holding it like tiny claws. A concave-tipped beading tool is then pushed down onto each claw, forming a rounded bead. Complex designs, made up of 1,000 gems, involve etching and shaping some 6,000 beads. Such is the level of skill required that, even with 33 years experience, Frederic is able to set only four to ten stones an hour depending on the setting—be it bead, prong, bezel, channel, baguette, or mystery.
For optimum light, each piece is polished throughout its creation. Even interior surfaces that won’t be visible in the final design are hand-shined using ribbons and fine strings. The trick is to shine without wearing down the metal. “Imagine you are the piece itself. Always keep a close eye on your work,” advises Frederic.
Every creation, we learn, represents teamwork. To assemble a complex necklace may take 1,000 hours—from eight months to a year. “A trained eye can tell if one jeweler makes one side and another, the other side,” explains Carole, so one jeweler takes the lead and the rest adapt to his or her style. Many keep the same cheville, the wedge-shaped wood bench pin upon which they work, throughout their careers, even if they transfer to another house.
Four hours isn’t long to share the secrets of a craft that takes decades to master. Yet when we emerge onto the Place Vendôme, diplomas in hand, I join the tourists gazing at the windows of No. 22. Be it a necklace of 94 diamonds or an emerald-winged butterfly ring, my new appreciation of the years of experience and hours of delicate crafting makes each small masterpiece gleam all the brighter. I think I may even recognize the hands of Frederic.
L’École Van Cleef & Arpels
19 Place Vendôme, 75001 Paris
Seven four-hour modules or chapters, 600 to 950 Euros each, are in English or French. Visit lecolevancleefarpels.com for details on registration, fees and schedule.
