There is something of the Audrey Hepburn about Francesca Amfitheatrof – a steady, wide-eyed gaze and easy grace that are reminiscent of the famous actress. It is quite the coincidence, then, that Amfitheatrof is the design director of Tiffany & Co, the legendary jewellery house immortalised by Hepburn’s most famous film.
It took Tiffany almost five years to select a new design director after John Loring, who retired in 2009 after 30 years. Granted, when set against its 177-year history, five years is a relatively short period of time, and this is a company that likes to get things right.
There are few names in the world that are as ingrained in the popular consciousness as this one – and it’s not just the “Breakfast at ...” thing, either. This is a company that sold jewellery to Queen Victoria and Russian tsars, was responsible for creating the invitations for the opening of the Statue of Liberty, and more or less invented the engagement ring.
Then there’s that famous picture of Steve Jobs, sitting barefoot and cross-legged in his first home. There’s no furniture – because he couldn’t find anything that matched up to his exacting aesthetic ideals – save for a Louis Comfort Tiffany lamp, the iconic piece named for and designed by Tiffany’s first design director.
“People love Tiffany so much,” Amfitheatrof acknowledges over lunch at Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, during her first-ever trip to the UAE. “They all feel like they have a little bit of Tiffany inside them – or that they have the solution for you. Which is kind of endearing, because everyone is very connected with the brand.”
If Amfitheatrof feels any pressure about taking on the responsibility of such a weighty role (she is the company’s first female design director and only the eighth person to hold the title since the company was founded in 1837), she’s not saying so.
“It’s a huge learning curve and I am still reading a lot about the history of Tiffany,” she says. “There are so many great stories. In that sense, it’s thrilling and an honour. The biggest challenge is not to lose yourself. To make a Tiffany for the 21st century, you have to be very focused on bringing all the categories under one hand. Whether it’s fashion jewellery or engagement or couture or statement pieces – all of them need to feel like they are made by the same hand.”
Born in Japan, to an Italian mother and a Russian- American father who was a foreign correspondent for Time magazine, Amfitheatrof grew up in New York, Rome, London and Moscow. She remembers making her first piece of jewellery – a silver hairpiece with etched stones – when she was just 15 years old.
“I fell in love with jewellery very early on,” Amfitheatrof says. “It was one of the first things that man did – he adorned himself. Jewellery is so symbolic. It has power because it carries so much of you in it. It sits on your skin, it becomes a part of you, your skin almost moulds around it. It’s like a little time capsule – a symbol of a moment, a lifetime, a person. Or it can be talismanic. It’s so small but it is so powerful.”
Amfitheatrof went to art school in London but always knew she wanted to focus on three-dimensional creations. She narrowed her focus down to jewellery, before going on to do a BA in jewellery design at the esteemed Central Saint Martins and an MA in jewellery design at London’s Royal College of Art.
This was against a backdrop of 1990s London – which was in the throes of its yuppie period; everyone was consumed by a money-hungry, Thatcherite mentality and wanted to work in the City. But it was also an important time for the arts – the Young British Artist crowd, now commonly known as the YBAs, was gaining ground, and Amfitheatrof counts the great Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy among her contemporaries. “It was a very momentous time,” she recalls.
After seven years of studying, she returned to Italy and spent a year perfecting her art with a master craftsman in Padua, before returning to the United Kingdom to show her first collection. That was the start of a 20-year career that has seen Amfitheatrof create jewellery and accessories for Chanel, Fendi, Temperley, Marni and Asprey, as well as tableware for Alessi, and furniture and lighting for the interior designer Muriel Brandolini.
Then she received the call from Tiffany & Co – and was presented with the opportunity to move to New York and take on one of the most high-profile jobs in the industry.
At the time, she was settled in London, living with her husband and two children, now 5 and 7, in a house that they had only just finished decorating. “It took a while for it to sink in as a possibility,” she says. “But it was one of those dream opportunities. It was also perfect timing, in terms of what the brand wants to do strategically.”
On September 1, almost a year to the day since she took on her new role, Amfitheatrof launched her first fashion-jewellery collection, Tiffany T. Its tagline, Unapologetically Modern, is telling. Designed around a statuesque letter T, the collection has an unexpected freshness to it, and represents something of a departure for Tiffany, which is so often associated with unattainable diamonds and engagements rings that you have to wait for someone else to buy for you.
Tiffany is opening itself up to a wider audience, inviting women to come in and buy themselves a little something, and presenting a fresher, more fashion-forward facet to its offering.
For inspiration, Amfitheatrof didn’t have to look much further than the city she now calls home. “New York is the ultimate city. It’s all about these incredible buildings and this vibrancy. I focused very much on the idea of the graphic form of the T, which felt very close to the buildings of New York and the grid-like planning of the city. It needed to have that elegant casualness that New York women have.”
Amfitheatrof has a saying: “You can never have too much jewellery, and it can never be too big”. But in terms of proportion, Tiffany T sits on either size of the spectrum – flitting between the delicate simplicity of pieces such as the Smile necklace and the bold chunkiness of the oversized T-bar cuff. It is a collection to be comfortable in. “Everything is easy to put on and take off. That’s what great design is. You don’t think about why you love it so much. You just do. You don’t think about how it moves and how it works, you just take it for granted.”
How easy was it for Amfitheatrof to push this through, I ask. Can brands such as Tiffany, which are so steeped in history, be weighed down by their own legacy, and become resistant to change?
“I think it’s quite an American attitude to not be weighed down by history. If you are in Europe, you have this weight on your shoulders. America has a real openness to newness. You can go into a French brand and they will all hate you because you are new. You arrive in New York and they love you because you are new.
“The other thing is that Tiffany, as a brand, has always been about this modernist approach. From Charles Lewis Tiffany all the way to Elsa Peretti, it has always been about a very entrepreneurial, forward-thinking attitude, a very unusual openness towards blue-sky thinking. What’s interesting is staying relevant; you don’t want to just be a didactic, historical storyteller.”
There is a recurring image that, for Amfitheatrof, captures the essence of the Tiffany brand – and however modern and unapologetic her current or future collections might be, they will always be guided by this single picture.
“For me, Tiffany style is about knowing when to stop. It’s a bit like Jackie Kennedy wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and a Tiffany Schlumberger bracelet, and that’s it, crossing the road in New York. Just that elegance and that confidence. That’s a strong image that I keep in mind. It’s extreme craftsmanship and beautiful stones, without overdoing it.”
sdenman@thenational.ae