Hermès Réseau lumière necklace. Price on application. Photography courtesy of Hermès. Hermès’ creative director of jewellery, Pierre Hardy, is known for producing unexpected designs and the Lignes sensibles collection is no exception. With its name translating to “sensitive lines”, the 45-piece high jewellery collection was inspired by the shapes and movement of the human form.
The Hermès Réseau lumière necklace, pictured, imitates the intricate network of our circulatory system with its web of white gold strands studded with 356 sapphires in graduated shades of green-blue, purple, yellow-orange and pastel pink.
“I wanted to transcribe these interior areas, to sketch their design on the skin. I see these lines as radiating out from them. I like the idea that you can choose a different anatomy, reinvent an intimate sensory system, like a wave that is made visible and given form by jewellery,” Hardy said of the necklace that hugs the throat, collarbone and clavicle, in constant fluid motion with the wearer. “The entire collection is oriented towards intimacy… The pieces sit in places that are connected to desire, creating an eroticism that inevitably reinterprets the body.”
He refers to his desire for this collection to not just reflect the body but become one with it. “In my previous collections, the link with the body was achieved through metaphors such as the chain,” he said. “Here, it is direct — the jewellery is closer than ever to the body itself. The pieces fit closely around the finger, around the neck, around the wrist. I wanted to return to this symbiosis: to be at one with the skin.”
The Hermès Réseau lumière necklace, like the rest of the collection, is designed to glorify the body of the wearer. “Geometry is inherent in all of us, art merely reveals it,” Hardy added. “I love that the body holds so much symmetry; it is a wealth of mechanisms and articulations. The jewellery I create attempts to bring to the surface these inherent facets of the human body, and to exalt them.”
