FACE VALUE: If Marie Antoinette’s downfall is said to have started with a diamond bracelet, the latest chapter involving the doomed French queen starts with a bracelet.
She is one of nine women with a taste for jewelry featured on a 65-by-80-foot hoarding with XXL 3D jewels covering the Rue de la Paix building that’s home to 413-year-old jeweler Mellerio, imagined by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.
“It all started with this bracelet that my grandmother owned, which my father called ‘her treasure,’” the designer told WWD. “She was very particular when it came to jewelry — she only loved historical pieces, curio jewels and she always wore mismatched earrings for example.”
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That bracelet, featuring seven cameos, is the very one Marie Antoinette bought from a teenaged goldsmith named Jean-Baptiste Mellerio through the gates of Versailles.
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Now in the French jeweler’s archives, that bracelet led to a meeting between the veteran designer and Laure-Isabelle Mellerio, the jeweler’s artistic director and member of the 14th generation of the family, where they connected over their love for color and history.
When the time came for the planned renovation of the building’s facade, he was the obvious choice for a theatrical, curtain-like covering that recasts the restoration tarpaulin as an Italian palazzo in the heart of Paris, Mellerio said.
Taking pride of place on it are “the women who traversed the history of the house,” de Castelbajac added.
Alongside Marie Antoinette are the likes of Empress Joséphine, the first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, sporting a coral set from the 1810s; Marie de Medicis with an eponymous collar design from 2013, and Margherita of Italy, wearing a 1967 tiara figuring wild roses and laurels.
“I wanted all these queens to be totally contemporary,” he continued. “They were all determined, audacious, modern women and they surround Laure-Isabelle [Mellerio],” who takes pride of place in the center of this “galaxy of remarkable women,” sporting the “Jardin des rêves” set inspired by Marie Antoinette’s private Versailles apartments.
While the tarpaulin and scaffolding are slated to stay only until September, Mellerio and de Castelbajac teased a possible continuation of their creative conversations.