Adorned with Chopard’s flamboyant cubes, Bella Hadid is surrounded by an abstract urban scene set against the backdrop of a night skyline infinitely repeated in a play of mirrors, in which lit-up windows in buildings echo Ice Cube’s brilliance. Night reveals the incandescence of the jewellery in a fascinating juxtaposition of two icons. Without shadow, there is no light: such is the common thread running through the images in this ‘Sculpted by Light’ campaign.
As the collection’s central motif, the cube embodies an idea of geometric perfection and magnifies the light bouncing off its facets. Chopard’s Co-President and Artistic Director Caroline Scheufele introduced this motif in 1999 through a watch that ditched flashy artifice to focus instead on pure shapes. Ever since, the collection has continued to evolve in a perpetual dialogue with light.
Reflecting the Bauhaus movement’s principles emphasizing simplicity and functionality, this minimalist, uncluttered aesthetic is characterized by highly graphic lines using only essential elements: light, shape and resistant materials. Ice Cube meets the minimalist inspiration of modern architecture through its vertical nature evoking the skyscrapers of international capitals that are natural homes to the avant-garde. These streamlined, geometric designs are showcased in the new ‘Sculpted by Light’ visuals. Minimalism is expressed as an art of living that involves choosing to safeguard essentials, meaning all that is precious and enduring rather than ephemeral. Ice Cube jewellery embodies this desire to focus on that which is simple, pure, beautiful and lasting.
Ice Cube stems from a quest for perfection combining high technology and craftsmanship. While each cube with its identically repeated motif may appear simple, each of its four perfectly symmetrical edges is in fact subtly facetted. As a result, light finds a wealth of refraction points in these tiny surfaces, multiplying the jewellery’s brilliance. Highly technical machining resulting
from six years of R&D has enabled perfect milling that creates taut lines on minute surfaces. This constantly optimized, diamond-equipped tool machines the precious metal to the nearest hundredth of a centimeter, producing a pre-polished surface of exceptional quality. The mirror-polished surface is further buffed with a dedicated pad to endow it with ultimate shine and brilliance: this phase is done exclusively by hand, as is the diamond paving on the gemset sections.
Firmly committed to an ethical approach blending seamlessly with its identity, Chopard favors essential and enduring creations. As early as 2017, the use of ethical gold to produce the jewellery in the collection testified to the Maison’s commitment to responsible practices. While Chopard made ethical gold the norm for all its watch and jewellery creations the following year, the fact that it used Ice Cube to spearhead its sustainable endeavors demonstrates its attachment to a collection that is part of a contemporary approach in which materials are every bit as important as product design.
