As winter creeps in, dramatic crucifixes, jet-black chains and various Gothic symbols edge alongside it. This month, at PAD London, the Paris jeweller Elie Top unveiled his most dramatic crucifix designs to date. And, on Louis Vuitton’s S/S 2025 Paris runway, there was nothing particularly sunny about Nicolas Ghesquière’s oversized, huge, matt-black chains. So far, so bohémien.
Then there’s the release this year of Fear and Love: The Story of the Exorcist, a behind-the-scenes retelling of the famed horror film that Aldo Cipullo designed jewellery for. Arguably the most legendary jewellery designer of modern times, the American-Italian designer created Cartier’s screwdriver-lock Love bracelet and Juste un Clou (Nail) jewels. And it is Cipullo's Hamsa Hand pendant design that we see swinging portentously around the neck of Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil in William Friedkin's 1973 movie.
Elie Top’s oeuvre is steeped in the glorious influences of Gothic architecture. 'I was born in Flanders, and, at a very young age, meticulously drew what I was passionate about, Gothic churches, castles and maps,' the designer confesses. Indeed, it was Top who, after my first visit to view his Vincent Darré-designed Paris atelier for Wallpaper (featured in issue W*198), convinced me to go to Saint Chapelle directly after. This city chapel, with its 15-ft high stained-glass windows, so expansive as to render the walls almost invisible is, as its custodians claim, a ‘radiant jewel’.
This month, Top adds a majestic new element to his La Dame du Lac collection, inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrated Arthurian Tales . He has introduced two high-jewellery crucifixes. Both are outlined in the designer’s signature gold and distressed-silver, and created in the square, Maltese-cross style. One is simply set with diamonds, citrines and Tahitian grey pearls, the other rich in tanzanite, garnets, diamonds and central Tahitian pearl. Each glints with ecclesiastical splendour.
Deep in the Sussex countryside, a very different expression of medieval craftsmanship has emerged in the form of the artist and jewellery designer Natasha Wightman’s haunting designs, such as her 'A Call to the Wild' jewelled hair comb, pictured above. Her deep fascination with the wild nature, woodlands and corvids that surround her home has drawn Wightman into the rarefied world of ancient English artistry.
Today, the artist works directly with a handful of master craftsmen whose precise design philosophy and understanding of ancient, organic materials add a medieval frisson to her gold and boxwood jewels, and found Edwardian chains. Each design is created beyond the idea of pieces being simply handmade. These seriously studied, museum-worthy designs amount to beautifully eerie fables all their own.
Perhaps it is Gabrielle Coco Chanel, we have to thank for medieval Gothic’s cyclical influence on fashion jewellery design. So entranced was she by Roman jewellery, Venice Basilicas, and the cabochon-set statuettes at the Munich treasury, she invited Duke Fulco di Verdura to create a pair of Maltese Cross cuffs in their reflection in the late 1920s. By the 1950s Chanel had entered into an enduring partnership with the master costume-jewellery designer Robert Goossens, who introduced a more organic expression of Chanel’s passion for ancient symbols and styles.
Notably, Goossens updated Chanel’s Byzantine jewel aesthetic with natural rock crystal, introducing an icy, ethereal blanche as a counterpoint to the traditional bold-colour stones. In so doing, it blurred the medieval dictate and introduced a more mystical, futuristic, aesthetic. Today, Goossens, still family-run and Chanel-owned, skews towards collections designed around pastel-toned semi-precious stones. Its trademark rock-crystal designs, however, continue to fill a welcome space between old and new Gothic traditions.
So, it's not all poetic doom and mysterious gloom. New York jeweller Eva Fehren's Pink Warrior ring, marked out by its sizeable pinkish-brown diamond in the "coffin", or shield, shape, emits a supernatural draw all its own. Simone Rocha, meanwhile, creates costume jewels that draw on the high drama of Victorian Gothic traditions with a smidgen of light relief.
Take her crystal embellished Ombre Drip earrings – ice clean on the top, sunrise pink in the middle and seemingly dripping with hot, red wax, or whatever else you care to imagine, at the bottom. Modern Gothic to the core.
