Description
A long sautoir in 18K yellow gold, ending in an octagonal pendant set with smoky quartz and finished with a tassel of fine gold chains. Worn, it falls well below the collarbone and the tassel swings with the body — a necklace with weight and motion rather than a fixed ornament.
The design comes from the object the house was built on. Louis Vuitton began as a trunk maker, and the Emprise collection takes the language of the steamer trunk directly. Gold studs run around the bevelled border of the pendant, front and back, exactly where the brass corner hardware sits on a trunk. The reverse is a smooth plate with the LV monogram raised at its centre, in the manner of a maker’s plaque on a case.
The house has described the pendant as drawing on the high ceilings of Haussmann’s Paris, the coffered plasterwork of the apartments built as the city was rebuilt in the nineteenth century. Both readings hold. The octagon with its recessed frame works equally as a ceiling seen from below and as the lid of a trunk seen from above.
The stones are cut to that architecture. A square step-cut quartz sits at the centre, framed by eight rectangular baguettes that form a border around it — step cuts throughout, with long parallel facets rather than the scattered brilliance of a round stone, so the quartz reads as panels of warm translucent brown set into gold. The chain is a wheat link, and the piece is monogrammed and numbered.
