Jewelry – the Process and Creation

Jewelry – the Process and Creation: Behind the scenes of today’s fashion houses, jewelry is produced for the runways. How did this come to happen? Where did it begin?

Jewelry – the Process and Creation

History:

Although Desrues was born as a company in 1929, its story actually began several years earlier when its founder, Georges Desrues, began working for Mr. Chandelier, a craftsman producing costume jewelry and accessories, and who was working with the great Parisian couturiers of the time.
Convinced that fashion was his vocation, Georges Desrues developed the company, bringing in new ideas and skills (engraving, polishing and gilding) and turned Maison Chandelier into Madeleine Vionnets sole supplier.
In 1929, Mr. Chandelier retired. From his workshop in the rue Amelot, just a stones throw from the Cirque d’Hiver, Georges Desrues took over the running of the company, working with a number of the most prestigious designers of the time including Jeanne Lanvin, Christian Dior, Mademoiselle Chanel and Yves Saint-Laurent.

The first collections of buttons for Mademoiselle Chanel were created in 1965, and Georges Desrues was soon to become her preferred supplier. In 1984, he transferred control of his business to Chanel in order to protect the vast know-how acquired over the years. Georges Desrues continued his work, his great passion, until his death in 1992.

The companys development, driven by the remarkable success of Chanel, soon meant that the premises in the rue Amelot were too small, so Desrues moved its workshops to the North of Paris.

Desrues Today:

At Plailly, in the Oise region, with its large atrium windows overlooking the countryside, Desrues company of 200 highly skilled employees work on machines that are able to mould, sculpt, dye, gild, emboss, enamel and polish the most precious jewelry and buttons for Chanel, its biggest client, as well as for Louis Vuitton and many others.

Desrues has preserved a high level of know-how devoted to an exclusive niche market, a reminder of its special partnerships with the great French couturiers of its time (Chanel, Lanvin, Vionnet, Dior, Saint Laurent), but has also incorporated modern techniques in order to meet the needs of the luxury ready-to-wear market.

Every one of the glorious items of personal jewelry belonging to Mademoiselle Chanel, given to her by Grand Duke Dimitri Romanov or the Duke of Westminster, has been reinterpreted and reproduced to the delight of Chanels clientele. Equally, Karl Lagerfeld has never once created a collection which did not include unique pieces of jewelry designed to satisfy the most unexpected desires of every generation: toe rings, bracelets, hair jewelry and anklets alongside Byzantine crosses, cuff bracelets encrusted with hard stones, cascading pearls, necklaces and curb chains. Thanks to the combined talents of man and machine, eight times a year a new collection of at least 100 pieces is offered to the public.

In the days leading up to the designers catwalk shows, the atmosphere within the company becomes feverish with activity. Each collection may require the creation of forty or so new buttons, plus a hundred new pieces of jewelry made from the most diverse materials with the most complex finishes. This makes each collection a real challenge for Desrues, which the firm handles brilliantly thanks to its skilled staff and a unique network of suppliers. Since it was founded, more than 80,000 products have left its workshops, a real treasure-trove covering 70 years of fashion.

Nothing is impossible to a willing heart, this quote could actually be the motto for the Desrues company, where imagination supports both tradition and innovation with the same creative flair.

Crafts:

Moulding and casting metals, glass enamelling, machining wood, remodelling resins, polishing, soldering, lacquering, varnishing, gilding, silver plating, working with lead glass and threading pearls: Desrues is home to a wide range of specialisations.

On either side of a long corridor punctuated by numerous doors, the company puts it skills to work. Each door opens onto a workshop, where meticulous hands work with copper, pewter, silver, mother-of-pearl, jet, wood, galalith, glass and even resin to produce outstanding buttons and pieces of jewelry.

Everything begins with a mock-up. From this prototype, which embodies the designers ideas, a metal or silicon mould is made; molten metal is cast, centrifuged, removed from the mould and deburred. It is then polished, using a buffer, ready to be gilded, silver plated or given its patina and varnished. For organic materials (animal horn, mother-of-pearl, etc.), templates are created using computer-aided drawing techniques and are then programmed into the automated laser cutting machines. The thousands of buttons created in this way then pass through quality control, the final manual operation in this fascinating creative process.

The nature of jewelry, however, requires that a certain hand-crafted element be retained. The heated glass rods which position beads are guided by hand, the links in chains and belts are assembled and crimped by hand, and the setting of pearls and cabochons is also a manual task.
In order to meet the needs of its clients, Desrues has successfully and subtly combined high-tech resources with the skills of its craftsmen.

Author: al kutone