The French designer’s new collection is inspired by Nordic atmospheres, landscapes, and mythologies.
After exploring much of the world, traveler Lydia Courteille arrived in Tucson, Arizona, to purchase a batch of white dendritic opals. These stones sparked the desire to create a diamond collection. The new White Paradise collection, in short, is above all a journey into an atmosphere, an ideal place: the Great North. But it is a place of fantasy, where indigenous art, Arctic flora and fauna, Norse Viking legends, and a dash of Game of Thrones come together.
The collection has a snowflake-inspired undertone, with white dendritic opals evoking the cold, along with bluish moonstones, creating effects reminiscent of the Northern Lights, and diamonds evoking ice crystals.
The collection features jewelry such as a totem with an opening that evokes the passage to the Celestial World to acquire knowledge, inspired by primitive Native American art. A pendant features the figure of a shaman wearing a bear mask singing songs to the stars, which for many Siberian peoples embody the creation of the cosmos and society.
Bicolor tourmalines, meanwhile, evoke the struggle for survival, the battle between animals that devour each other, leaving traces of blood on the snow in this hostile world. Meanwhile, a whale, covered in gray diamonds, cuts through the frozen sea, represented by an Australian opal, surrounded by floating icebergs.
