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WITHHER HEAVY-LIDDED EYES, ANGULAR CHEEKBONES
AND PENCHANT FOR BOOTS AND A MINI-SKIRT,
Françoise Hardy was the quintessential ‘60s French pop star.
The original yé-yé girl. Whether they understood the words or
not, a generation on either side of the English Channel hung on
her every sad, seductive note. Wannabe ingénues everywhere
cut floppy fringes, lined their lids with kohl and lamented along
with her about loneliness and lost love. Hardy’s Lolita-like appeal
and style, along with the advent of mass media, meant she served
as an early prototype for today’s chart toppers. But come 1968,
the kind of innocence Hardy had been peddling no longer
seemed relevant. Worldwide revolution was rumbling and Paris
was at the epicentre. The spirit of rebellion was at its peak among
French students – especially women – who took to the streets in
demonstrations calling for political and social transformation.
Yé-yé was no longer oui oui. A new era of liberation was
dawning among the youth and one jeweller, at least, was
listening closely to the cries for change.
In the same year that saw the jumbo jet take flight, the first
humans orbit the moon and Hardy decide to give up live
performances and collaborate on a studio album with Serge
Gainsbourg, French jeweller Van Cleef & Arpels launched
a collection that would change the course of history for the
house. It started with a necklace; long, gold and strung with 20
four-leaf clover motifs, modelled after those Jacques Arpels
(nephew of Estelle Arpels, who co-founded the maison with her
husband Alfred Van Cleef) used to pluck from his garden in
Germigny-l’Évêque, or so the tale goes. An immediate success,
the house officially named it Alhambra, and the quatrefoil
pendant with its signature beaded edge
became an unofficial “icon of luck”. But luck
had nothing to do with it. The founding family,
who started the brand in 1906, had a shrewd
nose for the zeitgeist. Rather than maintaining
a lofty distance from the action as would be
expected of a high-end jewellery house,
Van Cleef & Arpels chose to plug directly
into the dramatically shifting attitudes,
which author and historian Nicholas Foulkes
summed up in his coffee table tome dedicated to Alhambra:
“Young people led by new artistic and intellectual figures called
loudly for a fairer society that was less uptight, more spontaneous,
more ‘popular’.”
As early as 1954, the house had identified
a desire for easy-to-wear, accessible pieces.
Over a decade before the Alhambra
necklace was created, Van Cleef & Arpels
had opened a youth-oriented destination
store, La Boutique, next door to its historical headquarters on the
Place Vendôme, plus another in Fifth Avenue, New York. The
boutique catered to “a new type of woman”, says Foulkes. One
who made her own money, bought her own jewellery and threw
it on with irreverence. “The maison had correctly understood that
jewellery had not disappeared but was being worn differently. It
was also shrewd enough to be able to look at the world of free
love, free speech and free festivals and to descry the emergence
of a new style.” La Boutique allowed for a kind of whimsy that
hadn’t appeared in the high-end jewellery salon, appealing to
the increasingly affluent French bourgeoisie and championing
“a younger, newer, freer way of wearing jewellery”.
The Alhambra necklace easily took up its place in the Parisian
La Boutique range. It’s trailing length and organic inspiration
recalled the hippies of Haight-Ashbury who had celebrated the
summer of love just a year earlier wearing daisy chains looped
around their necks and not much else. Only these gold necklaces
were destined for hippies of the haute variety – women like
a newly liberated Hardy and actresses Jane Birkin and
Talitha Getty – who were flouting established codes while
interpreting mood-of-the-times through the lens of luxury.
An iconic photograph of Hardy taken in 1974 (see opposite
page) captures her metamorphosis from ‘60s living doll to ‘70s
sophisticate. Dressed in wide-leg black crepe trousers and a fine
black knit, she’s wearing two Alhambra chains and looks
self-assured and comfortable with her place in the world. “Even if
the Alhambra was created in 1968, it epitomises the ‘70s,”
says Catherine Cariou, heritage director of Van Cleef & Arpels.
“The ’70s is the decade of ‘flower power’, hippie-chic style...
a decade inspired by freedom, by liberty and,
for me, Alhambra is really the epitome of this
freedom. It is a decade where we created a lot
of jewels using very vivid, very joyful colours. >“THESE GOLD
NECKLACES WERE
DESTINED FOR
HIPPIES OF THE
HAUTE VARIETY”FREE SPIRITS:
The late’60s was the era
of Jane Birkin (right) and
the Woodstock Festival
hippies (below)Student riots in Paris, 1968