At Paris Trend Week, Antwerp jewelry home Wouters & Hendrix celebrates its fortieth birthday

Karin Wouters and Karen Hendrix have been jewelry designers to the Antwerp Six, rising with the art-school collective when, within the spirit of a radical Flemish style bomb, they left Belgium in a rented truck and rolled up at London Trend Week in 1986. The pair had honed their craft alongside Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and the others at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Wonderful Arts. Having began promoting their Surrealist-tinged, handmade jewels in Antwerp two years earlier than, they have been concurrently creating items with the designers round their collections.

This week, throughout Paris Trend Week, Wouters & Hendrix (which nonetheless adheres to the RTW-schedule of two collections a yr), launches its most high-brow challenge so far, in partnership with the just lately revived Royal Museum of Wonderful Arts, or KMSKA, Antwerp. A part of the jewelry home’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, the ‘Je est une autre’ assortment is straight impressed by 4 work Karin Wouters and her crew selected from the museum’s Nineteenth-century saloon. The result’s a set that culminates in 4 Nineteenth-century model parures (full units) of jewelry, additionally provided as separate RTW items. As is typical with Wouters & Hendrix designs, lots of the rings, earrings and necklaces, created from sterling silver and gold-plated silver, are ingeniously modular and are rigorously crafted to be dismantled and worn in quite a few methods.

‘When the museum posed the concept of a collaboration their preliminary thought was that maybe we would make a jewelry line for them,’ Karin tells me on the home atelier, a former liquor distillery in central Antwerp, ‘However for me it is unimaginable simply to make solely stunning issues. I have to have a narrative, one thing with depth, so we requested to decide on 4 work that may make us assume. Then we requested ourselves: “If these ladies lived at present, who would they be? What jewels would we create for them?”’

For Carmen Willems, basic director at KMSKA, any Wouters & Hendrix collaboration was a win-win. ‘Firstly, the very fact of them being such sturdy craftsmen was a genuinely good match. Then, the way in which during which they all the time convey a twist to what they do correlates with our new imaginative and prescient for the museum,’ she informed me on the museum’s celebration to have fun the model’s fortieth anniversary.

After a couple of classes with the museum curators, the jewelry designers settled on a formidable quartet. ‘We approached our visits in an impulsive means, whereas listening to the museum curators’ tales and insights,’ Katrin reveals of the collaborative course of. ‘The 4 work we settled on intrigued me very a lot: the Parisian Sphinx is dreamy, mysterious, even, whereas a defiant Cleopatra is experimenting with poison in preparation for her demise. The Countess Rattazzi seems daring, rebellious, simply in the way in which she stands, and the portray of the girl with the infants? She drew us in simply as we have been strolling by.’

Because of this, the parures have been created to suit the characters of every lady within the work, as Katrin and her crew evisaged them. “The Parisian Sphinx” by Alfred Stevens impressed the aquamarine-themed ‘Parure de l’Entourage’. The salonnière “Countess Rattazzi” by Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran knowledgeable the ‘Parure de l’Incroyable’ in boldly elegant chain designs that ‘shimmer with out the necessity for stones’. Alexandre Cabanel’s “Cleopatra”, in the meantime, is the drive behind ‘Parure de la Salamandre’, its salamanders reflecting the Egyptian queen’s ‘expertise for shrewd reinvention’. The ‘Parure de La Peregrina’, a homage to the picture of the ‘formidable, anonymous mom in Virginie Breton’s “A l’eau!” is a specific favorite, a pearl-based assortment that ‘celebrates the ocean as our birthplace and the extraordinariness of “atypical life”.

Although, maybe lesser recognized within the UK, the impartial nature of Wouters & Hendrix’s topsy-turvy collections of handmade costume- and fine-jewellery is wildly interesting to a brand new era. Collaborations are, in fact, within the model’s DNA, and tasks with Belgian photographer Mous Lamrabat and equipment and jewelry designer Stephanie D’heygere are simply two notable Wouters & Hendrix inventive get-togethers. The Antwerp home at present helms a string of standalone boutiques throughout Belgium and Amsterdam, with worldwide outposts in Japan, China and North America.

Karen Hendrix left the enterprise a few years in the past however her maverick spirit is palpable within the atelier and thru the collections. ‘Forty years in the past, I couldn’t have imagined our world could possibly be like this,’ Katrin Wouters admits. ‘We began, simply the 2 of us, believing in our small firm and what we have been doing. And now we’ve arrived right here. Once I look again, I see that every jewelry story we create, although totally different and stunning, is a response to the gathering earlier than, in that, we take the data and expertise we get and all the time attempt one thing new with it’.