This new appointment will mark the jewellery house’s strategic foray into developing a new language for its accessories segment. While Mary Katrantzou comes from a womenswear and architectural design background, tackling this genre will not be an entirely new concept. Her graduate collection for her MA in womenswear at Central Saint Martins saw silhouettes that explored jewellery within the fashion spectrum. It has been an ongoing dialogue that she has engaged with in her previous collections as well.
“My inspiration always came from outside of fashion, so I wanted to find a way to create an image that doesn’t exist in the world. And that could be inspired by the filtered beauty that you find in design, whether it’s in jewellery, or ceramics, or interiors,” explains Katrantzou over a Zoom call. Consider the final result an undressed recipe, or a finely mulled reduction of what you see. With her debut assortment called the Mary Katrantzou Calla Collection for Bvlgari for instance, the scaled Serpenti transforms into ingenious handles on quilted leather. Another bag comes with a bejewelled exterior. “That was my point of interest— how do you filter existing symbols in design, translate that into fashion and allow that to be as definitive as a cut or a drape?”
This particular signature of twisting existing ideas into a newfangled piece of design was a subconscious realisation she arrived at much later while working in the fashion space. “I didn’t recognize that early enough in my career, but what I recognise now, even after 16-17 years working as a designer, is that what inspires me is the idea of challenging perception and taking one element of design and turning it on its head,” she says. The act of modifying the existing is what Bvlgari has also historically done with its designs like the iconic Serpenti, which has seen a variety of iterations through the decades. The brand’s founder Sotirio Bulgari, was a collector and a curator, constantly inspired by the historical symbolism he saw when he first arrived in Rome as an immigrant. These same archives built by his ideology are what Katrantzou references to formulate her direction in the brand’s segment.
There is a strong resonance between Katrantzou’s own Greek heritage and the roots of the heritage jewellery house, which makes her the perfect fit to interpret the design legacy and do it with her own flair. She is most enamoured by the traditional iconography that exists within the brand’s vaults, and how it has been interpreted with modernised designs and experimentation through the ages, especially as a “hard luxury brand,” in Katrantzou’s words, referring to the traditional codes most jewellery names in the same category rarely deviate from. “These symbols communicate different facets of the brand. A Monete woman sometimes is not a Serpenti woman. Monete has its own history of design. There are rare ancient coins that have been beautifully integrated into the jewellery. That for me is a unique perspective.” Katrantzou wants to explore this with her own take as the head alchemist. Mixing colour with materials, adding a narrative and grand symbolism to top it off, making this next-gen accessory, entirely fresh, and an investment piece rather than something trendy. “There’s an alchemy in producing Bvlgari’s designs and I channel that in my work with a collage of different elements.”
Launching into a conversation about the technicalities of her design process, it’s clear that it’s not the title of the next It-bag that the designer is chasing, but something that hopes to touch the buyers at a deeper level. “It is not like choosing to buy a bag with a logo, or a status symbol. Here you are also buying the preciousness of the bag. That is a big responsibility and a challenge—to think of these pieces as we think of the jewellery,” she concludes.
