Palladium
The Palladium Alliance International and DJS Marketing Group continue the recently announced promotion of palladium to the jewelry market. According to them, palladium enjoyed attention from both the visitors and exhibitors at the BaselWorld Show-2008 not long ago. According to the PAI data, this metal was used in the majority of collections produced by deluxe watch and jewelry designers. Cartier was able to sell every limited edition Pasha de Cartier palladium timepiece. Parmigiani’s collections contained 32% of jewelry pieces also made of palladium.
The recognition of palladium at the Basel Show was documented in a video shot by PAI in team with DJS Marketing Group. Video commercials contain information about this metal describing its difference from platinum and its jewelry features.
Titanium
The International Herald Tribune focuses its readers’ attention on titanium as a promising jewelry material.
For a jewelry industry wedded to precious metals, titanium was, and still is to a large extent, an unknown quantity, the newspaper writes. Not only is it difficult to manipulate because of its remarkable strength (this metal named for the hero of Greek mythology is as light as aluminum but stronger than steel), but also the metal flouts every major tenet of luxury. No rarer than the beach sand from which it is extracted, it lacks the heft and intrinsic value of gold or platinum and does not evoke any cultural traditions. While gold and platinum still dominate the fine jewelry market, titanium has made inroads at the very highest echelons of the jewelry universe thanks to a handful of world-class designers who have been seduced by its feather weight and kaleidoscopic possibilities.
“I am particularly fond of titanium,” said Wallace Chan, a gem carver who began experimenting with the metal in 2000 at his workshop in Macao. “What draws me most to titanium is the colorful nature of the metal. It is a way to open up a wider world for design.”
Inert and hypoallergenic, titanium is ideal for, safe to say, earring posts. Its weight, or lack thereof, allows Chan to design dramatic chandelier earrings or gemstone brooches with a wispiness that belies their scale.
“The market perception is that titanium is cheaper,” Chan explains. “But in terms of added value and design, it’s a lot more valuable.”
The Swiss watch industry came around to titanium in the 1990s, as watchmakers began incorporating it into bracelet models. The metal is now ubiquitous, even among prestige brands.
But jewelers have been slow to embrace it. Titanium’s strength is often a liability at the bench, where basic stone setting becomes a Sisyphean task of trial and error. Casting calls for temperatures of 1,650 ºC, and an inert atmosphere, while finishing requires tools of similar durability.
Simple, machined men’s bands are widely available online at sites likes Titanium-jewelry.com - which sells the ring collection of designer Edward Mirell - but at the ultra high-end, only a few workshops around the world are capable of working with the metal.
Among jewelry artists, Joel Arthur Rosenthal, or JAR, a jeweler in Paris at the vanguard of contemporary design, is generally regarded as the first to have made a foray into titanium in 1987, when he created a mauve-colored bangle encrusted with gem-set flowers.
“We sold it in New York in April 2002 for $500,000,” said François Curiel, international director of Christie’s jewelry department. “At the time, it was a record for a JAR jewel.”
Another Christie’s darling, Michelle Ong of Carnet (Hong Kong), first used titanium in 1995 to create a brooch. This thing, she said, “combined a sense of fluidity and lightness with the necessary strength.”
Titanium now constitutes about 10% of the Carnet collection, a colorful assortment of East motifs - dragons, flowers, feathers, lace - many of which are impossible to render in gold or platinum, lest they rip the silk dresses they are meant to adorn.
In Antwerp, Belgium, Francis Mertens, a talented jewelry newcomer, has forged a reputation for making delicate, voluminous designs that test the limits of titanium’s capabilities.
“I want to coat it, color it, make it look like gold,” said Mertens, whose jewels are sold exclusively at Bergdorf Goodman in New York (this store has repeatedly been named the best by U.S. luxury consumers). “There’s no value in titanium so you have to come up with other ways to make it attractive.”
Even companies in traditional jewelry-making Italy are committed to the metal. Jack Hadjibay of Andreoli, a manufacturer in the small Piedmontese town of Valenza, said he has spent three years perfecting a titanium collection that includes a butterfly pin that took four months to produce.
From Rome, where the designer Fabio Salini uses colored titanium to make earrings of jade, red spinel and tanzanite, to Geneva, where the society jeweler Suzanne Syz relies on local ateliers to create jeweled confections, like her earrings in pink titanium, the metal is being used as a platform for magnificent gemstones.
At the workshop of the Hong Kong designer Edmond Chin, for example, 10 one-of-a-kind diamonds in graduating shades of green will soon be mounted in a bracelet encircled by rows of green diamond pavè.
“We might set it in titanium,” Chin said. “We like to do things that are technically challenging.”
That jewelers of Chin’s caliber are willing to experiment with high-tech metals augurs a time in the not-too-distant future when goldsmiths may consider the earth’s most exotic metals fair game, the daily notes.
