#INTERVIEW: Lucia Silvestri, Creative Director at BVLGARI Jewelry
Lucia Silvestri is Bvlgari’s Jewellery Creative Director, and award winner of the “Gem Award for Jewelry Design” during the 15th Annual GEM Awards, held on January, 2017, in New York.
Lucia was just 18 years old when she began her career in the Bvlgari gemological department. As often happens in the case of true love, she was instantly enamored by the world of precious stones. She fell in love, she says, “with the colors, the variety and the energy that I felt emanating from the gems”. At that point, she chose to leave her biology studies and dedicate all her passion and enthusiasm to gemstones. The Bulgari brothers quickly intuited Lucia’s great potential, a talent to be nurtured, and decided to teach her the trade. As Lucia tells it, “I was the right person, in the right place, at the right time!”
At the age of 20, she began traveling the world, meeting with the world’s foremost gemological experts, not to mention countless others in the field of jewellery with the most refined aesthetic sensibilities handed down through generations. Geneva, New York, Antwerp, Jaipur, Colombo… every trip was filled with unforgettable discoveries that became experience and, over time, expertise.
Before taking on the complex and delicate responsibility of acquiring gems, she spent years sorting and selecting the semi-precious stones purchased by the Bulgari family. This was the mid-‘80s, when there were only five Bvlgari shops in the world and the entire process of creating a jewel involved only a tight circle of family insiders, to which Lucia gained access through her intelligence and skill, participating in the magic of the birth of Bvlgari’s astounding jewels.
“One of the first things I learned”, Lucia recounts, “is to select and then acquire gems only if I could see a possible use for them, which means that in the very act of purchasing, before the design and realization phases, I was imagining compositions of colors and forms that might suggest the pieces of jewellery that they would become”. A creativity that is expressed, then, in the first instant of contact with a given stone, one that gives rise to forms and chromatic combinations that are often unexpected; that become, through the work of Bvlgari’s designers and expert craftsmen, the exceptional one-of-a-kind pieces of the brand’s luxurious high jewellery line.
She travelled extensively, sometimes with the brothers, sometimes alone, in which case she would describe to them the cut and color of a given gem by phone, unthinkable unless she had earned their total trust and proven her affinity with their tastes, acquired after decades of working together on a daily basis.
On June 1st 2013, Lucia realized her lifelong dream by becoming Bvlgari’s Jewellery Creative Director, reaffirming yet again her passion for precious stones and her extraordinary creative flair. “One of my greatest challenges as a Creative Director, is to remain true to Bvlgari’s identity and design signature, constantly reinterpreting the esthetic codes for women that are never the same. To reach such an excellence, I am always looking for new shapes, new creative plays, new inspirations, new gems combinations and also there are constant efforts in the implementation of our techniques. Each artisan in the Bvlgari Atelier works on one High Jewellery creation at a time all day long, for a minimum of three months per piece – a perfectionist process that can take up to a year or more “.
Tanja Beljanski: What is it that you love about designing jewelry the most?
Lucia Silvestri: Knowing that I am creating an object that will make a woman more beautiful, a man more vain but above all, as regards the one of a kind pieces of high jewellery, they are real works of art that will remain over time and that I hope will be handed down from generation in generation.
TB: You have started to work for Bvlgari very young. How do you see your path to becoming high jewelry designer?
LS: The passion, the love that grew more and more every day for this job, the humility of learning from scratch, knowing how to listen, look around, be curious, and first of all having had the Bulgari brothers as great mentors.
TB: Which stones and materials do you prefer working with?
LS: I love all the stones; it’s very difficult to say. As you maybe know, I speak with the gems. Sometimes I am in love with a diamond then with an emerald. At this time I really love a spinel and I’m starting a negotiation. My favorite stones are the sapphires - the blu and the colored ones.
TB: Each stones has its meaning. Each combination tells the story. What would be the most poetic combination in your opinion?
LS: Color has always been a distinctive trademark for Bvlgari. Therefore in high jewellery we will continue exploring new design ideas and unusual sophisticated color combination through the use of the exceptional gemstones. All this elements will be coming together in one of a kind jewels representing the quintessence of the Bvlgari design, taste of beauty unique sense of volume and preciousness of materials. In addition to this, two years ago we had heavily reinforcing the diamond jewellery collection with the launch of Fiorever.
TB: Where do you find the inspiration for designing jewelry?
LS: During my travels abroad, in Rome, reading, visiting our beautiful museum in Rome; especially this year due to the Covid-19 restriction, I cannot travel and I am rediscovering Rome.
TB: For me jewelry is like a poetry. How do you see it?
LS: Vanity never goes out of style and I think this can also be said about jewellery. Jewellery has the power to transform a woman into a Goddess, just by the sheer act of wearing a piece that they are fascinated by, it brings them to another echelon of pleasure. Women love jewellery. It’s as simple as that.
TB: Do you have a favorite historical reference that you always return to?
LS: We have so many beautiful reference that it is hard, as well as unfair, to choose one over another. I must admit that I love our Monete; I have my personal small coins collection.
TB: How do you design? What form do your earliest ideas for a collection take?
LS: The high jewelry process is more complicated because it always starts with the stones that I place on the wax table and I start making the layout. For diamonds, it is easier because we start from the design, while for the fine jewelry we start from the sign and reinterpret it as B01, Serpenti or Diva and Fiorever.
TB: What is your favorite piece in Bvlgari history?
LS: Elizabeth Taylor’s soutoir with the most beautiful sapphire that exists in the world and which fortunately is now part of our private collection.
TB: When paying homage to the original Bvlgari spirit, what inspires you with the house code?
LS: The Bvlgari design has been able to follow the evolution of the inspiration in an always consistent way for more than 125 years. We have stood out from other competitors thanks to our recognizable style, which is uniquely characterized by a bold design based on the reinterpretation of themes and motifs inspired by architecture, art in an innovative and evocative way.
TB: What do you bring to Bvlgari as your own signature?
LS: To maintain a recognizable style based on the ability to reinterpret our code with of course my personalities touch of style with quality, design and product - technical innovation.
TB: What is today a must-have Bvlgari piece?
LS: It is very difficult to answer this question but I would say that a tubogas chocker with Coins, a B01 bracelet from the Zaha Hadid collection, the new B01 Rock ring, a Serpenti watch and a high jewellery necklace with a colorful layout cannot be missing. But I could go on, this is just the beginning of the list.
