Deep Secrets

For a milestone new collection, Tiffany dove into its archives and came back up with hands full of treasure.

- STELLENE VOLANDES

If you step inside the Tiffany Landmark store at 57th and Fifth at just the right moment, you will spot a diamond Jean Schlumberger bird flying across a screen. If you miss it, the real thing sits atop an enormous amethyst in a vitrine just steps away. Another is perched on a kunzite, one on a citrine, one on an aquamarine, and another on what might be morganite. That’s only the main floor. On the fourth there’s a dedicated Schlumberger area, and on the seventh, the floor that showcases Tiffany High Jewelry, Schlumberger dominates. At the opening of the Landmark in New York in May, more than 30 notable guests wore his pieces, including the three men behind the whole affair, Alexandre Arnault, Tiffany CEO Anthony Ledru, and architect Peter Marino. Schlumberger, in fact, is the sole inspiration for Out of the Blue, the new Blue Book collection, which is the first fully realized one since LVMH acquired the brand.

Why the big Tiffany bet on this wildly imaginative Frenchman and his bejeweled passerines? Because big bets are in Tiffany’s blood. Witness the Landmark itself. As Tiffany clients moved uptown, in 1940 it moved with them, but instead of just a storefront on newly fashionable Fifth Avenue, it commandeered the whole corner. When Charles Lewis Tiffany went to buy the French crown jewels for his provenance-hungry American clients, he didn’t pick up a couple—he bought nearly a third of the lots. When he hired George Kunz in 1879, he didn’t expect the famed gemologist to find pretty stones, he entrusted him to scour the world for ones that hadn’t even been discovered yet.