Pierre Hardy, who is understood for his distinctive model of stealth glamour, is in a philosophical temper. The artistic director for Hermès footwear and jewellery believes there’s by no means been a greater time to look past the apparent and embrace one’s esoteric aspect. “It’s positively a second for contemplation,” he observes, “to concentrate to all the things that’s occurring on the earth.”

Hardy, who joined Hermès in 1990, is musing about his newest high-jewelry assortment, Les Jeux de l’Ombre, comprising 53 items impressed partly by the moody Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century chiaroscuros of Caravaggio. A former dancer, the Paris-born Hardy explains that the dramatic assortment, his seventh since he launched Haute Bijouterie for the posh home in 2010, kinds a pas de deux between “the 2 sides of Hermès.”

Nowhere is that this duality extra obvious than within the standout Lumière necklace, a triptych gentle field with sliding black enamel panels engraved with the Brides de Gala motif, one in all Hermès’s most iconic scarf prints, which open to disclose a solar medallion. Borrowing from Caravaggio’s concept that shadows comprise an internal gentle, and designed to be worn both closed or open, Lumière units the stage for the passage from darkness to brilliance, the outer panels with black spinels giving method to rose gold set with diamonds and pink mother-of-pearl.

Although Hardy will not be normally given to overt narrative in his designs, all the assortment, he says, tells an overarching story concerning the contrasts present in nature. The triptych necklace alludes to the alignment of celestial objects that happens throughout lunar and photo voltaic eclipses. However the Lumière can be a nod to olde-worlde stage equipment and contraptions. “It’s the primary time I’ve experimented with jewellery that strikes,” Hardy says. Among the items within the assortment recall to mind the luxurious automatons favored by Seventeenth-century aristocrats and now prized by watch and jewellery collectors. “We used an intricate watchmaking mechanism, however it’s precisely the identical idea as they used to have in theaters within the Seventeenth century to make gods or angels seem onstage.”

Not that Hardy is all about descending deities and cosmic phenomena. For the perennially cheery designer, his foray into the obscure provides a portal right into a world of chance. “Everybody has been out strolling at evening and tried to outrun their shadow,” he says. “You may’t; it’s larger than you and part of you. We have to embrace our shadow. It’s like a ghost, however a playful one.”

Apart from, he provides, it might be boring if all the things had been at all times shiny and glowing. “The great thing about jewellery,” he surmises, “is when it transcends materiality, worth, and value and as an alternative makes you dream and suppose. Both there may be magic or there isn’t.”