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Gaia Repossi, the French jeweler known for her ear cuffs, double rings, and divinely original off-kilter way with placing stones, is celebrating 10 years of her Serti Sur Vide collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris tonight. Frankly, she couldn’t have picked a better venue: an art space—Repossi is an arthead—housed in a building covered in an exoskeleton of intersecting lines. The iconic Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers museum is a pretty snappy simulacrum of what she does as a jewelry designer: architectural rigor meets functionality meets a very original sense of decoration.

That’s certainly true of the collection that’s being celebrated, with its unique and distinctive geometry of stones and precious metals. Repossi’s career at the family owned jewelry house has been marked by that old maxim , coined by another Frenchwoman with a penchant for the charm of the reductive gesture: refusing to be obvious, or clichéd, or crass in her work. What Repossi created has certainly been influential—how many times have I stood at some appointment at a storied jewelry house over the years, spied a double ring (or a row of stones snaking from the earlobe up), and thought, ? So I was happy to see Gaia herself when she Zoomed in to chat about her career: where she started, what she wanted to say—and why the value of jewelry should never just be thought of in monetary terms.



I was reluctant to go into my father’s profession—not that I didn’t love him, but I didn’t .

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