The story behind Van Cleef & Arpels’s new collection of extraordinary jewels, Legend of Diamonds, reads like a fairytale. It started in 2018 with the discovery of a rough diamond of unusual weight and brilliance: the Lesotho Legend, the fifth largest rough diamond in both size and optical clarity ever mined. Adding to the mystique, the exceptional stone came from the Letseng Mine in Lesotho, which is known not only for providing remarkable gems, but also for being committed to ensuring complete traceability of rough stones.
While Van Cleef & Arpels rarely works with rough stones, this was an opportunity too inviting to pass up. The creation of an entire high jewelry collection around the Lesotho Legend was a project that took four years, and entailed the collaboration of many technicians and experts. The best diamond cutters in Antwerp worked with both state-of-the-art software and traditional manual techniques to cut the rough stone into a family of 67 diamonds, totaling 441.75 carats, nearly half of the original stone’s weight. The quality of each of the diamonds extracted is exceptional, ranging from Flawless to Internally Flawless, which is the highest purity standard possible.
Once cut, a portion of the 67 diamonds were transformed into a collection of 25 pieces, each made using the signature Mystery Set, a complex gem setting technique mastered by the maison’s Mains d’Or. Patented by Van Cleef & Arpels in 1933, the Serti Mystérieux involves mounting each stone into extremely thin gold rails, each less than two-tenths of a millimeter, making the prongs invisible. The gems seem to float on the surface of the jewel, shaped as if by magic.
The most spectacular piece in the new collection is the Atours Mysterieux necklace, where the heaviest stone cut from the Lesotho Legend is given pride of place; its stunning 79.35 carat oval diamond is surrounded by a set of equally luminous rubies, intertwined with diamonds in a ribbon-shaped swirl. The technical ingenuity that is a Van Cleef & Arpels signature is reflected in the transformable nature of the necklace; the central diamond can be detached and worn on a simple chain.
