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Waris Ahluwalia, jewelry designer, bon vivant, and Wes Anderson posse member (he most recently played the wonderfully grumpy conductor in The Darjeeling Limited), found the muse for his new collection in a very Waris-esque way. While staying at his favorite Parisian hideaway, the Hotel Raphael, he had a moment with a tiled wall in a fourth floor bathroom. “When I saw the bird mosaic, my worlds collided,” Ahluwalia says. “I instantly saw it as an enamel treasure.” He named the bird “Raphael,” the starting point for the first piece in his Omnia Vincit Amor (“love conquers all”) collection, influenced by traditional Indian Mughal jewelry. “The inspiration for my work is simple: love and history—although I’m not claiming to understand either,” Ahluwalia says.
The designer worked with his craftsmen in Jaipur to cast the feathered figure in enamel using the ancient meenakari technique, in which the silhouette is cut by hand, painted, and then baked. Five other birds (Octavian, Roma, Spero, Virgil, and Liberte) followed in a flock of white, green, red, and black, adorning dangling earrings, chains, and pins and set in silver or 24-karat gold. “I sat with the artists in my workshop six days a week for about six months. It’s an amazing process to watch; every piece is one-of-a-kind because they’re etched by hand. They’re little works of art you can wear around your neck,” Ahluwalia says. He also translated this avian theme into a marvelous apple-size pendant encrusted with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds, which hangs from a gold chain, and ruby-dotted rings meant to mimic snakeskin. These pieces took more than a month each to assemble using another traditional Indian technique, kundan, which dates to the sixteenth century and was popular with the royals. The idea for the last piece in the collection was conceived as spontaneously as the first. “The ruby and diamond cap earrings are actually palm-tree leaves I couldn’t stop staring at while on vacation in Barbados,” he says. “What started in a hotel room in Paris continued to Barbados and finally manifested itself in Jaipur. A beautiful little journey.”