A L E E S H A H A R R I S

N E W Y O R K On a stage suspended above the crowd gathered inside the Fifth Avenue flagship store of Tiffany & Co., rapper A$AP Ferg performs his hit song Plain Jane.

The Harlem-raised hip-hop star, who is a member of the rap troupe A$AP Mob, pauses his party per-formance to mention how, not long ago, he thought he’d never be able to walk in the venerated jeweller’s doors, let alone close out an eve-ning of celebrations honouring the launch of the company’s new Paper Flowers collection.

Now, he said, he is being gifted pieces by the brand.

The commentary on attainabil-ity — of luxury being approach-able and achievable — seemed to be in keeping with the overarching theme of the new Tiffany & Co.

“Today, at Tiffany, we start a new cultural conversation,” said Ales-sandro Bogliolo, the company’s chief executive.

Earlier in the evening, Holly-wood starlets and fashion models including Michelle Williams, Nao-mi Campbell and Kendall Jenner — as well as assorted international media, bloggers and a smattering of the American jewelry brand’s top executives and clientele — looked on as the new Believe in Dreams campaign film, starring Elle Fanning, was revealed.

The short film begins with Fan-ning, dressed in a hooded sweat-shirt, peering longingly into the Fifth Avenue store windows, the scene in black and white. As she stares at the gleaming Tiffany Dia-mond, a piece in the display win-dow, a delicate dragonfly, begins to come alive. What follows is a Tif-fany Blue-hued dance party, set to a remix of the song Moon River, which was performed by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

This time, though, the tune is sung by Fanning and rapped by A$AP Ferg.

During a May afternoon that served up near record-breaking temperatures, the American jewelry purveyor rolled out an ambitious marketing campaign in support of the launch, turning New York City’s yellow cabs Tif-fany Blue, offering free coffees (in branded paper cups, of course) at coffee carts and paper flowers on display in trademark blue buckets at bodegas dotting Manhattan. Even select subway stations were awash with the robin’s egg hue.

The entire spectacle was cap-tured and documented on social media platforms using the hash tag #TiffanyBlue — more than 400,000 times on Instagram alone. The emphasis on creating viral, share-worthy moments for the Paper Flowers jewelry launch was in keeping with what Bogliolo had said about the company’s new direction.

“Paper Flowers is a very impor-tant launch ... it is very important for the growth and for the success of this company,” he says, adding that the collection was the “most important launch” for the com-pany since 2009, when the Tiffany Keys collection was released. “Es-pecially for our mission and our vision to become the new genera-tion, the next generation jeweller.

“This collection combines every-day jewelry together with one-of-a-kind pieces,” he said. “This is important for us, because this is the first time, ever at Tiffany, that we have a collection that ranges from high jewelry one of a kind pieces all the way to fine jewelry. … All beautiful, even if at different price ranges.”

Under the direction of Reed Krakoff, who took the helm as the new chief artistic officer for Tif-fany & Co. following the depar-ture of design director Francesca Amfitheatrof in 2017, the jewelry purveyor is clearly embarking on a new direction.

Krakoff, who has had a long his-tory in the fashion world, most no-tably with the leather goods brand Coach, revolutionized the way shoppers view luxury products, ushering in a wave of “accessible luxury” that allowed a wider vari-ety of consumers to enjoy branded designer goods.

It seems he’s poised to write a similar story at Tiffany & Co.

“If something is extraordinary, it should be something that ev-eryone, within the context of ev-eryone that’s shopping, can buy or feels that it fits into their life. It’s not just about price,” Krakoff says.

“That delineation between high jewelry, fine jewelry and day jew-elry is not really a delineation. It’s more about creating a concept and then filling it with things people want to wear.”

Krakoff says that when he first set out to create the collection, he knew immediately that it would be a more vertical offering.

“The idea was to really create high jewelry that wasn’t so much about the price — and there are

some very expensive pieces — but be more about creating motifs with materials that aren’t usually done in a bold and different way,” he says.

With a disruptive take on tradi-tion in mind, Krakoff and his team hit the 181-year-old company’s ex-pansive archives.

“There is an enormous number of floral motifs that Tiffany has worked with and rendered and referenced in the collection. We started thinking that maybe that was our starting point,” he said. “But, at the same time, it’s a very traditional motif. So we started to think of a way of reinterpret-ing it in a much more modern and simple graphic way.”

What began as “playing” with cut-outs, quickly transitioned into a preoccupation with the very ma-terial that was being used to shape the model designs: paper.

“These petals, this motif of an iris that is simplified, it was more just a suggestion of a flower. We started thinking ‘can we combine them in a way that feels made by hand and artisanal?’ So this be-came the idea of a pin holding to-gether the petals, which brought together our idea of artisanship and nature together in one place,” he says.

The idea of the iris, which fea-tures prominently throughout the Paper Flowers collection, came to the team from a watercolour draw-ing found in the archives that dat-ed back to the 1800s. The flower’s scent is also the main note of the Tiffany & Co. fragrance.

“There was something contem-porary and something historical that kind of seemed like it would blend in with Tiffany,” Krakoff says.

“The motif, the type of flower, the way it was rendered, was all solidified.”

With the inspiration and the mo-tifs figured, the team then moved on to colour.

“We started thinking about the idea of using colour in a diamond collection,” Krakoff says. “The iris was the easy way of understand-ing colour and referencing some-thing in nature. The purple-y blue is a tanzanite, which is a histori-cal stone for Tiffany. The yellow for the firefly references the Tif-fany Diamond, which is the most famous piece of archival jewelry.”

Krakoff’s design team then moved on to the creation of the pieces. And this is where they looked to shake things up even further.

“We started talking about how people don’t want to put things away in a box and take it out occa-sionally. People want to interpret things their own way. Some will wear a very expensive handbag with jeans, they’ll wear a couture dress with flats. We wanted to interpret that kind of free personal inter-pretation of high jewelry with this collection,” he says. “You will see pieces that are quite extraordinary and very fantastical, and you’ll see pieces within the same collection that can be worn with a T-shirt.”

He says the designs, which range from delicate pendant necklaces to extravagant baguette cuffs and even a choker necklace and are priced from $3,400 to more than $1 million, are designed with the expectation that they will be worn in unique and unexpected ways.

“It’s very much that way of treat-ing luxury in a personal way,” Kra-koff says.

It’s an approach to exquisite pieces that Krakoff is confident will resonate with jewelry buyers, both young and old. The writer was a guest of Tiffany & Co., which neither reviewed nor approved this article before publication.

A NEW DIRECTION FOR TIFFANY & CO.

Luxury jeweller starting a ‘cultural conversation’ with Believe in Dreams campaign

Tiffany Blue taxis line Fifth Avenue in front of Tiffany & Co.’s flagship New York store as the 181-year-old luxury jewelry brand launches its new line earlier this month.  P H O T O S : T I F FA N Y & C O.

Rapper A$AP Ferg helps launch the new Tiffany Paper Flowers line.

Tiffany Paper Flowers drop necklace in platinum with diamonds, $19,000

Tiffany Paper Flowers open drop earrings in platinum with diamonds and tanzanites, $19,000

Tiffany Paper Flowers bracelet in platinum with diamonds, $47,400

Tiffany Paper Flowers open ring in platinum with diamonds, $7,450

S AT U R D AY, M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 8 VA N C O U V E R S U N C3Y O U