In 2018, Chaumet continues to explore exploration with Les Mondes de Chaumet, a High Jewellery collection representing three destinations in three stages. After the Promenades Impériales of Russia in January, and then Japan’s Chant du Printemps in June, Trésors d’Afrique is the third halt on this creative journey through reinvented realms.
Trésors d’Afrique tells a five-part story of a multifaceted Africa. First of all, the Africa whose artistic expressions inspired Apollinaire, Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck and Braque, thus playing a major role in the greatest aesthetic and intellectual revolutions of the beginning of the last century, from Fauvism to Cubism and Surrealism. The Africa of sovereigns next, as the last continent on which an empress reigned, where the parure defines status. Indeed, no land has elevated the art of adornment to such a degree of inventiveness and sophistication, where the jewel, an accessory of seduction or power, sublimating beauty and prestige, has a thousand forms and uses. Highly symbolic, it says everything about whoever wears it, its protective virtues giving it the role of a talisman. As the jeweller of emotions and the diadem, Chaumet thus found much common ground between its narrative creations and African adornment, alternately a wedding jewel or symbol of elevation when it crowns the head, with gold and stones, or skillfully sculpted hair. Trésors d’Afrique tells of an Africa that boasts an original nature, a nature that’s generous - offering us its treasures - and storied, inevitably fascinating for a Maison that has always explored naturalistic themes.