Lydia Courteille: A shining star in the world of fine jewels

Parisians know best what it means to be fashionable in every aspect of life. It’s rooted in their DNA. Everything is measured ad infinitum in quest of total perfection. It’s just like not a single step is taken until it’s acted upon. As a result, one can easily peep into a French woman’s sparkling beauty she knows how to portray through her high passion for jewelry.
This is what prompted the famous French jewelry designer Lydia Courteille to start designing the incredible jewels that fire up emotions of love in the hearts of women from around the world.
In an exclusive interview with Arab News, we sat down with her to find how she came to launch a brand of her own in the end, what jewelry means to her and much more.
Lydia’s name is often talked about when it comes to one having an acute understanding of rare yet beautiful wonders of jewelry. She launched her brand in 1987 with a tiny shop nestled in Paris’s Rue Saint-Honore primarily with the aim of owning and showcasing a massive collection of vintage and contemporary marvels of jewelry. And it’s everybody from collectors to experts and amateurs who get taken aback with what they see in her shop — these nuggets of timeless pieces of jewelry. Stuck in the midst of having exhibited 7,000 jewels and many of them sold already, Lydia was rightfully thinking of taking a shot at jewelry-making with the great knowledge she had.
Now creating terrific pieces of jewelry for almost twenty years, she knows exactly the taste of today’s sophisticated women in jewelry. “I got drawn to the sheen of jewelry because I knew deep down that it’s a perfect way to shed light on cultural taste and most importantly to make women look beautiful,” she says.
Extraordinarily, she never ever felt it obligatory to go to any prestigious design school in order to learn the craft of jewelry-making. Besides, we all can call Lydia a scientist for she is a graduate in Biochemistry. “To change it all, I took some course on how to do quick draw lately,” she says. “It has just bolstered my technique.”
Lydia is someone always keen to bring forth the unthinkable in jewelry design. This is what sets her creations apart from the rest. “I think I push the limit of the subjects I work on. I make aesthetics, subversive pieces,” she says. “Because of this factor, I’ve been able to create a signature style of my own— there is a big volume of happy colors and a real story to tell behind each collection.”
And the list of celebrities wearing her jewelry is quite impressive with the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Catherine Deneuve, Alber Elbaz, Madonna, Ricardo Tisci, Stella McCartney and many more. “Women find a source of pleasure and satisfaction in their jewelry collections,” she says.
She finds inspiration in her travels, museums and reading. While she sources the stones from everywhere, she loves going to auction houses and stone fairs for the same.
At the moment Lydia’s market in the Middle East is minuscule but she is hopeful that things will get better soon. “We make one-of-a-kind pieces only. After all, we cannot have a good price in the mass market,” she says. “We were lucky a few years ago when we were able to sell a few pieces to Her Highness Sheikha Mozah (the Queen of Qatar) through Ali Bin Ali.”
Lydia always aims big resulting in her participation in many high-profile fine jewelry exhibitions as she says, “Showcasing our scintillating designs in such exhibitions is important because we get a chance to meet journalists and this is one way to ensure our designs are well-protected.”
Her latest collection titled “The Queen of Sheba” touches on the human race as well as the mythical reality of Ethiopia where Queen Sheba once ruled.
In a nutshell, each designed piece is reflective of Lydia’s own personal style statement; it should be feminine but a little bit extravagant.

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