Indian jewelry design is rising to the top. A breathtaking diamond necklace designed by internationally renowned jewelry designer and chairman of Firestar Diamond, Nirav Modi, will be the highlight of Sotheby’s Hong Kong Magnificent Jewels auction scheduled for April, The Economic Times of India reports. The necklace will have a starting bid of $8 million. It is made of 17 high-quality diamonds, mostly from Russia. It took 1,500 hours of work to create. The largest diamond in the necklace weighs 10 carats, while the smallest is 2 carats. In total, the diamonds weigh 85 carats. “It took us two years to procure all the diamonds,” Modi revealed. The Indian designer has had 20 of his designs listed at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the past four years. In a Christie’s auction in 2010, a Modi diamond necklace from Golkonda (the Indian region with mines where gems such as The Hope Diamond, Idol’s Eye, Koh-i-Noor and Darya-i-Noor have been found) was auctioned for $2.62 million. In a separate Hong Kong auction, but by Sotheby’s, in 2012 another Modi diamond necklace, Riviere Diamond, was sold for $5.1 million to an Asian buyer. Modi was the first Indian jeweler to be featured on the cover of Christie’s auction catalogue in Hong Kong alongside famous names such as Harry Winston, Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Nirav Modi is a third-generation jeweler, trained in Belgium and moved to India in 1990 to work with his uncle. In 1999, he launched Firestar, a company that today has a turnover of $1.3 billion and manufacturing units in India, Russia, Armenia and South Africa. Modi. Aspires to be the Cartier of India.
