The Italian house’s latest presentation of high jewelry and watches delivers opulence fit for an emperor.
Dressed in a sharp yet relaxed suit paired with an open-necked white shirt and a slim white-gold Serpenti cuff, Bulgari chief executive officer Jean-Christophe Babin is all smiles as he opens the doors to the jeweler’s latest high jewelry presentation, Aeterna.
“We have more millionaire pieces than ever,” he says buoyantly, gesturing to the presentation in the halls of the Terme di Diocleziano, once the largest baths in ancient Rome. With more than 100 designs exceeding the €1 million ($1.1 million) mark, and many around €5 million ($5.4 million), Aeterna is the brand’s largest and most expensive high jewelry collection to date. The pièce de résistance is the Aeterna Serpenti diamond necklace, priced at an astonishing €40 million ($42.8 million), which Babin has dubbed “the piece of the century”.
In a world rife with political unrest and financial pressures, it seems an unusual time to push further into the high jewelry stratosphere. Yet Babin says its ascent is led by clients.
“Post-Covid, what we’ve seen is that people are purchasing less often, but better,” he says, likening it to lockdown’s effect on the sales of fine wine, which soared. “People have learned to appreciate the best.”
They don’t just want any emerald or sapphire, they want the best – and they are willing to pay for it.
Bulgari’s high jewelry and watches division has outpaced its standard collections in recent years, which Babin attributes to the pandemic-induced boom in sales experienced by many jewelers, as well as the resilience of high-net-worth individuals amid economic instability.
“High inflation rates are impacting the middle and upper-middle classes. Wealthy people are not feeling the burden of higher interest rates, as they don’t need to borrow money — they lend money,” he says. “So they continue to buy and they want to buy even better than before. Hence we’re not afraid to propose more millionaire pieces than ever.”
This is the essence of Bulgari Aeterna. While other high jewelry houses are constantly pushing design and material boundaries, Bulgari is content to draw within the lines. Aeterna is not about presenting ground-breaking newness, but taking the brand’s core design DNA and amplifying it. La dolce vita, al massimo.
Aeterna is filled with new twists and elevations of tested icons, including Serpenti, Divas’ Dream, Tubogas and Monete, with time spent seeking out extraordinary gem combinations. The sapphires, diamonds and buff-top emeralds of the Sapphire Brocade necklace, for example, took two years to source. Other exceptional stones include the 31.07-carat Zambian emerald set into the Tubogas Flower of Time necklace, and the 38.93-carat, cushion-cut, Sri Lankan sapphire that can be detached from the Sapphire Aeterna Waves platinum collier.
Balancing timeless appeal with excitement is a paradoxical challenge that creative director Lucia Silvestri and her team face constantly.
“It’s a huge undertaking,” says Babin. “If it’s trendy, in 10 years you won’t wear it anymore and our duty is to ensure that you will wear it forever with pride, that it will fit your style, your daughter’s style, your granddaughter’s style. At the same time, it has to evolve. [We want clients to look at a piece and think] it’s new, but I’ve seen it already. Hence, the [reliance on the] icons.”
Even what seems to be the most provocatively out-of-place design within Aeterna – the five-level Aurea Chandra choker made of gold and diamond-set spheres – is actually an homage to a Bulgari collection from the 1980s.
Where Aeterna does get experimental is with high jewelry watches, which are the imaginings of creative director Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani. The iconic Serpenti was well represented in Rome, with new innovations including its thinnest-ever Serpenti Pallini[1] , which has individual gems or gold granules set high along the coils. There was also the Serpenti Misteriosi Chimera diamond and emerald high jewelry watch that combines a snake’s head and lion’s head for the first time.
The real showstoppers were the Fuochi d’Artificio and Fenice secret watches. The first takes inspiration from fireworks, with more than 75 carats of rubies, sapphires, rubellites, garnets, tanzanites, tsavorites, tourmalines, topazes, amethysts, peridots, emeralds and diamonds exploding out across an onyx night’s sky. Fenice, which took 3,000 hours to create, uses a similarly impressive array of colored gemstones to create the fiery wings of a phoenix, with a 9.78-carat, pear-shaped Paraiba tourmaline that must be lifted to see the tiny watch face beneath.
“There’s only a handful of brands who can do [this kind of work], but very few dare to go that far,” says Antoine Pin, managing director of Bulgari’s watch division. “It’s an investment – and if you don’t sell them, they become a liability – but we love to own this field.”
Indeed, such a lavish collection does seem risky in today’s climate, but the upbeat Babin is undeterred.
“We are setting a new benchmark internally this year,” he says. “We’ve never reached such a level of excellence, but the beauty of excellence is that it is never too much – you can always push a bit further, and we want to push.”
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[[x-head]] “The piece of the century”
The glittering star of Bulgari’s Aeterna collection is the Aeterna Serpenti necklace. This masterpiece, a departure from Bulgari’s usual kaleidoscope of colored stones, is a pure celebration of diamonds.
Crafted over 2,400[2] meticulous hours to commemorate the brand’s 140th anniversary, it features seven pear-shaped diamonds totaling exactly 140 carats. All seven stones were cut from a single 200-carat rough diamond from Lesotho, which was offered directly to the brand by the miner.
The necklace’s wave-like pattern was first hand-carved in wax by an artisan before being cast in platinum. The design is made up of 18 individual parts that deliver a sinuous flow aided by a secret system of prongs and springs.
While the Lesotho diamonds might command all the attention at first glance, the custom-cut baguette diamonds filling the platinum waves are an exercise in stone-setting mastery. It took five months to assemble all of the diamonds required and meticulously set them into the design, leaving no visible gaps.
The clasp at the back of the necklace is further demonstration of the skill of Bulgari’s jewelers. The serpentine waves end there, taking the form of a snake’s head clamping down on its tail, with head and tail set with baguettes.
Such craftsmanship and provenance comes at a price: €40 million ($42.8 million). It is an exorbitant amount of money, but even before the showcase at Terme di Diocleziano had officially opened to Bulgari clients, the Aeterna Serpenti necklace had disappeared from its cabinet, ushered into one of the back rooms to meet an interested party.
