Carolina in the Florence atelier with her father

She shot to success when Sarah Jessica Parker wore her brand’s Lucky bracelet in Sex and the City in 2002, and she has gone on to fuse playful designs with her family’s fine- jewellery tradition. Carolina Bucci talks to LUX’s Samantha Welsh about creating and developing her own brand vision

LUX: Were you expected to join the family business?
Carolina Bucci: My family has made fine jewellery in Florence since 1885, and my father joined the business in his teens. He was clear there was no obligation for us to join, but that if we were interested he would ensure we had a proper apprenticeship. My brother and sister declined, but I was keen. Even before I studied jewellery design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, I had spent time watching our jewellers work, understanding how precise and physical making jewellery is.

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LUX: How did your vision set you on another path?
CB: Growing up, I was fascinated by costume jewellery: the colours, the shapes and the experimentation. I thought traditional Italian fine jewellery was stuffy and I couldn’t understand how my family heritage could be relevant to my style. In creating Carolina Bucci, I fused these two worlds. Our jewellery is made in the same traditional workshops, but we push our craft to create colourful, unexpected silhouettes that don’t feel formal. We like to say that we make gold do things that it shouldn’t do.

diamond and sapphire Color Field bracelet by Carolina Bucci

LUX: How did your brand adapt during COVID-19?
CB: We are small and family owned, so, whether it was the early restrictions in Italy, safety issues or moving business online, we were agile and I am proud of what we did. We closed our London store before there was any mandate from the UK government to do so; we donated to charities; we tried to keep this non-essential item uplifting. Our FORTE Beads seemed to capture the moment, and we found new ways to tell that story.

LUX: Who is the Carolina Bucci woman?
CB: There are so many voices to our brand. That is why we created La Catena [“chain”] on the website. I wanted a place for them to speak. Whether that is filmmaker Reed Morano talking about her creative process or art dealer Sarah Hoover on motherhood, there is an authentic passion, and I hope that is what we convey. I love designing jewellery and I love aligning myself with people who share that spirit in whatever they do.

Filmmaker Reed Morano for the brand’s website

LUX: Are you involved in content creation?
CB: I design our jewellery, and I am also involved in everything we do: the smell in our stores, the paper and ribbon we use, our digital comms. It is my name above the door, so it is my responsibility to sign off on whatever we send into the world.

LUX: Are you tempted to be more active digitally?
CB: Jewellery is and always will be a tactile category. We have an active, growing online platform, but we couldn’t be a predominantly online brand. Our presence online is just another way for people to interact with our pieces, but it can never replace our stores. We are building a new store in Florence, and one of its most exciting aspects is how it helps us think in a fresh way about our online store. I love how that dialogue happens both ways.

An illustration from Sarah Hoover’s take on motherhood from the Carolina Bucci website

LUX: What is your social-media strategy?
CB: The word that strikes me when I think of social-media strategy is “fatigue”. I think some people design with one eye on how products will look on phones. I am at the other end of the spectrum. If the design is good, those who buy the pieces are your best ambassadors, and whether they tell friends at lunch or post photos for strangers, I am happy for that interaction to take on its own life.

Carolina Bucci wears her own designs and a watch from the Audemars Piguet collaboration

LUX: What about your collaborations?
CB: Our long relationship with Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet has been phenomenal and brought us to a new audience. It started because I owned a 1970s AP man’s Royal Oak watch. It was perfect and I didn’t think it could be improved on. I redesigned it for women through a chance meeting with the brand’s CEO, François-Henry Bennahmias in 2013. It helped that we had shared values and ideas – both fourth-generation family businesses, focused on craft before anything else.

Read more: Cindy Chao on heritage and emotion in jewellery

LUX: What is your next move?
CB: We make jewellery, and I don’t plan to make anything else. At the same time, I love collaborating with best-in-class manufacturers… we have made glass in Murano with Laguna B, and stationery and leather goods in Florence with Pineider. I love this ability to inhabit other worlds, particularly in the service of Italian crafts.

Find out more: carolinabucci.com

This article was first published in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of LUX

Andreas Angelidakis, Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity, 2022, Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. © Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet

Samantha Welsh enjoyed a preview of Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s first superscale commission in Paris, ahead of the new Paris+ art fair this week

For the last decade, the world’s oldest family-owned watch manufacturer has been projecting its legacy and engaging with new audiences through art patronage. Plus ça change, you might say. But in true Audemars Piguet fashion, ‘To break the rules you first have to master them’ and the curators select challenging artists who provoke discourse, promote engagement, assemble an ecosystem. Lending support from inception through development to exhibition, APC nonetheless confers on its artists full rights of ownership to their work and this artistic licence produces ground-breaking art.

Andreas Angelidakis, Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity, 2022, Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. © Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet.

In Andreas Angelidakis, APC turned to an LA-trained architect-turned-artist of Norwegian-Greek heritage who is gay and takes a playful approach to excavating shifting perspectives and societal dichotomies.

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In an artful curation of artist with venue, APC opted for Espace Niemeyer, former HQ of the French Communist Party and oeuvre of futurist architect, Oscar Niemeyer. Venue and exhibition are a conceit, Angelidakis’ installation being a reimagined Temple of Zeus of artefacts nestled matryoshka-doll fashion inside Niemeyer’s structure, itself a UFO-like 11 metre high dome, accessed via an excavated trench to basement level.

Andreas Angelidakis, Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity, 2022, Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. © Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet.

All this is a metaphor for the visitor’s immersive deep-dive into the personal memories, experiences, mythologies of the artist. Angelidakis points to the subversion of truth through rumour, encouraging us to discern propaganda, celebrate diversity, embrace change.

Andreas Angelidakis, Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity, 2022, Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. © Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet.

The visitor regresses, childlike, into kaleidoscopically spotlit multi-worlds of ‘let’s pretend’, learning through play by interacting with outsize art-devices. A quasi story-time on the book-chair, a lesson in apocryphal urban myth (or is it reality) conveyed through the story of the stylite and the column, roomsets of soft-play ruins, a fairground mirror revealing us as others see us, and windows onto VR.

Read more: PAD returns to Berkeley Square

Emerging, blinking, back onto an ordinary Paris street, APC shows us that like mechanical watches, art tells you about more than what you see. Both need emotional intelligence and experimentation to be successful.

Find out more: www.audemarspiguet.com/adreas-angelidakis 

Commissions by Audemars Piguet include Ryoji Ikeda’s Data-Verse (2019)

Olivia Giuntini is brand director at family-owned Swiss watch manufacturer Audemars Piguet, known for its thoughtful artistic collaborations. LUX travels to meet her at their HQ high in the Jura mountains to talk about art, fish and why women don’t just want diamonds

Olivia Giuntini

LUX: So many brands are partnering with artists now. What makes you different?
Olivia Giuntini: We always want to push boundaries and pursue our own path with a free spirit. When we meet artists, we definitely see who has this spirit and who has not. For example, Ryoji Ikeda was not part of the plan historically, but we met him a few years ago. Some discussions happened and we finally met again two years ago and that’s the moment when he proposed his three-part audio-visual installation Data-Verse [the first part of which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2019], and, we said, “Yes this is the right moment to do it”. But Ryoji is an artist unlike any other. He is a musician and composer, and he is also somebody who uses open data that is accessible to anybody. This accords with what struck me when I first met him – his work is dedicated to making sure that people don’t use their brains first so much as their emotions. He is a kind of free spirit, which is something that definitely links us. It’s about sharing common values. Jana Winderen is another example. She came here and made music from the sounds of our village of Le Brassus. She always wants to raise the awareness of sustainability, so she went onto the lake here to record those fish that nobody can hear and composed music from that.

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LUX: Did you have any idea what the artist was going to do when you first spoke?
Olivia Giuntini: Composing music from the sounds of Le Brassus certainly wasn’t the brief. Not at all. We met her and she came back and said what she wanted to do. So we found a fisherman who was
prepared to spend hours on the lake with her so she could make the recordings.

LUX: Audemars is a fascinating family-owned company. Your chairwoman Jasmine Audemars, for example, was a campaigning journalist and edited the Journal de Genève.
Olivia Giuntini: We have really interesting discussions on the board. Of course, we still have to keep on building a future for Audemars Piguet that stays true to the founder’s vision. What Jasmine said to François-Henry [Bennahmias, the company’s CEO] when he was appointed seven years ago was, “I would like more people to know more about who we are. I would like people to respect us as we are.” And that’s what we need to do with this brand beyond the selling of watches and the crafting of amazing gardes-temps.

LUX: And are you looking to strengthen your relations with your existing collectors?
Olivia Giuntini: It’s funny, because if you talked to Michael Friedman, who is our head of complication, he will tell you there are no collectors in the world. But I agree with you – we do have collectors and we want to strengthen the relationship with them. We want to open other minds, too, such as women’s – I’m sure we’re not on their radar.

Dan Holdsworth’s Continuous Topography (2016) was also commissioned by Audemars Piguet

Read more: Tailor to A-listers Nigel Curtiss on designing identity

LUX: Why is that?
Olivia Giuntini: Because everything has been done instinctively within AP and, apart from Jasmine,
this has been driven by men. The fact that I’m here today and that we want to recruit more women into top management is because we believe that we need to have a different angle. We sell 30 per cent of our collection to women. But it’s not just a question of figures; it’s about being more visible to women who don’t know us because we’ve been a kind of masculine brand.

The new Frosted Gold Philosophique watch from the Millenary collection

LUX: Have watches always been considered male and a bit geeky?
Olivia Giuntini: Watches designed for women have been more like jewellery. And I’m constantly saying to men: don’t think that women are always looking only for diamonds. It’s not true. And I think that Audemars Piguet has a legitimacy there, in a field where we can offer female clients different kinds of finishes that are attractive and sophisticated. I’m convinced that many women are really interested in movements, but, honestly, it’s been a world driven by men and their preconceptions of women. It’s beginning to change, and we have a role there.

LUX: Is the aesthetic of the watch more important to women?
Olivia Giuntini: Of course, in a way. But I think that men are convinced that, for women, a diamond is more important than a movement. And I’m sure they’re wrong.

Find out more: audemarspiguet.com

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 Issue.