Bernard Delettrez was always a wanderer. As a child, he likely didn’t have much of a choice when his family migrated from Morocco to Paris. As he grew older, he continued roaming — from California, where he left a career as a Hollywood screenwriter to study gemmology, to Brazil, where a job managing an emerald mine awaited him. The mine business went bust before it even began, but Delettrez persisted. And within two years, he owned a factory that cut emeralds.
By the ’80s, he had begun designing jewellery for H. Stern, and rocked the industry by incorporating rock crystals into his designs — a move considered blasphemous to haute joaillerie at the time. Throughout the next decade, he built a retail business, selling jewellery through his own shops. But he retained his wanderlust. So in the ’90s, he got rid of his stores, set sail on a 32-metre yacht, and travelled the world for four years.
Today, Delettrez creates jewellery for his own eponymous brand. He flies from his flagship store at Via Bocca di Leone in Rome to his house in Kenya, and to mines in Tanzania, Zambia, and Madagascar. All this travel is a form of pursuit — “an eternal search for the rare and the beautiful”, as described in his bio. The search finds fulfilment in jewellery designs that use gold alongside silver, bronze, and brass, and combine precious diamonds and rare tanzanites with more playful stones. It also finds expression through what has become known as Delettrez’ signature dark, even Gothic, themes: jewellery in the form of skulls, eyes and insects, visualisations of things that typically make people uncomfortable.
The name of one recent collection might surprise some. What a Wonderful World (WWW) is described as “a clear ode to positivity and optimism”. “If we fail to grasp the beauty around us, we risk being overwhelmed by the bad. Just think, for example, of what we are experiencing in the economy or in politics. That’s why it’s so important that each one of us look for loveliness and, most of all, actively contribute to enhance it, in any way, at any level,” says Delettrez.
Comets, cupid’s arrow, and butterflies abound in this collection. So do Delettrez’ recurring theme of hands, but this time interpreted as a symbol of brotherhood. In previous collections, the hands appeared tongue-in-cheek in items like chokers, appearing to wrap around the wearer’s neck with sinister intent. One other collection, Fleurs du Mal, offers a more nuanced point of view. Translated as Flowers of Evil, the collection offers flowers along with skulls, eyes, hands, lips and jungle animals. Fleurs du Mal also contrasts beauty and danger through jewellery in the form of carnivorous flowers.
With his background in screenwriting and exposure to a variety of cultures through travel, Delettrez’ penchant for nuance comes as no surprise. Many consider snakes to be foreboding, but in Morocco they are seen as lucky charms, and even described as man’s best friend. A skull with a wreath of roses symbolises the attitude of ‘carpe diem’, reminding one to seize the day and live to the full. They’re not so dark after all.
This means that even as items like skulls recur throughout his collections, Delettrez transforms them into different symbols each season. Meaning, then, comes through context. But one constant remains: the quest to render designs as beautifully as possible. Delettrez has another mission — to eliminate people’s phobia of insects and skulls through beautiful jewellery. While one can say he is achieving this with every new fan and wearer, he has one more goal he will spend his life pursuing — that in his quest to find beauty and to confront the peculiar. www.bernarddelettrez.com
