Repossi has kept one address for forty years. Number six, Place Vendôme. To mark the anniversary the maison turns its own rooms into the subject and sends out new versions of the rings that made its name.
The boutique opened in 1986. It sits on the octagonal square that Paris keeps for its jewellers, a short walk from the Ritz, under the column Napoleon raised from melted cannon. Repossi took a corner of it and has not moved since.
The house is older than the shopfront. It began in Italy and reached Paris through four generations of the family. Gaia Repossi runs the creative side now, and the Vendôme boutique has become the clearest reading of how she sees the maison: spare, architectural, closer to sculpture than to the vitrine.
The rooms
Ten years ago she handed the space to Rem Koolhaas and his agency OMA. They pulled the jewellery boutique back to its materials. Light, stone and metal do the work. Coloured mirrors bend the room. Panels rotate to change what is shown and how.
The result reads more like a small gallery than a shop. Little sits behind the usual bright glass. The displays move with the collections and with the artists Repossi invites in, so the rooms are never quite the same twice. Koolhaas gave the maison a frame that keeps shifting.
A ring built like a small piece of architecture, sold from a room rebuilt to match.
The Splendid EditThe editions
For the anniversary Repossi returns to three of its own lines. Antifer, Berbère and Serti sur Vide each get a Vendôme edition. The designs stay recognisable. The maison changes the stones, the colour and the finish, and turns the whole exercise back toward the square outside the window.
Antifer built its name on stacked, staggered bands that read like architecture on the hand. Berbère runs rings up the finger in graduated widths. Serti sur Vide sets stones as if they float, held with as little metal as the setting allows. All three suit a house that treats a ring as a structure first.
Courtesy of Repossi — Place Vendôme, Paris
The campaign for the anniversary was shot on the square itself, the rings photographed against the bronze reliefs of the column. It makes the point Repossi wants to make in one frame. The jewels and the address belong together.
The square
Place Vendôme is the argument every fine jeweller wants to make. Cartier, Boucheron, Chaumet and Van Cleef all keep rooms on it. An address there places a house in the top rank without a word spoken.
Repossi sits inside LVMH's watches and jewellery arm, smaller than Bulgari or Tiffany and younger on the square than most of its neighbours. Forty years at number six is how it answers that. The rooms hold. The rings still look like buildings.
The Splendid Edit on Repossi's fortieth anniversary at 6 Place Vendôme. Details from Repossi and LVMH.
Photography courtesy of Repossi — Place Vendôme, Paris