The fine jewelry collection, meanwhile, features rings, earrings (which can be worn four entirely different ways), bracelets, and necklaces showcasing vivid textures meant to evoke a bird’s plumage, while birds themselves are the beating, glittering heart of the necklaces. When the rings are stacked, they interlock in much the same way as the feathers on a bird’s wing. Both collections launch September 2.
Unlike Santo Domingo and me, Verdeille, 49—who graduated from Paris’s prestigious Haute École de Joaillerie before finding her way to Cartier, Chaumet, and, since 2021, Tiffany—didn’t tramp through Central Park looking for inspiration: Instead, she scoured the massive Tiffany archive, though her prime inspiration was Schlumberger’s yellow cockatoo.
“He was—what’s the bird that collects things? He was a magpie,” Santo Domingo says. “He would travel all around the globe looking for new techniques, new materials, new craft, and he would collect beautiful things.”
“We tried to re-create the notion of levitation,” says Verdeille, “so that you feel that the bird is flying. Taken together as a whole collection, it adds up to a kind of poetry.”
Each bird she designed, of course, required different diamonds—different sizes, shapes, colors—and different amounts of diamonds, with some 20 or 30 on each head. (The tanzanite necklace, meanwhile, contains 594 diamonds and took almost 350 hours to create.) “Each one changes depending on how you wear it,” Verdeille says. “When you wear it, you create a new dimension.”
Aside from reinterpreting Schlumberger’s long-ago vision, Verdeille was out to do nothing less than transform the house of Tiffany. “How can we play with the DNA of the past while moving the bird, and the house, forward?” she asked herself. By adding movement and fluidity.
“The old tradition in Paris was to study the movement of animals at a zoo,” Verdeille continues, “and that was how we worked to compose this new bird—the wing, the tail.” In Verdeille’s “think different” tradition, though, the question was actually raised: Why did it have to be a cockatoo—or even a bird, for that matter?
“Before we settled on the cockatoo,” Verdeille says, “we did some owls, we did some peacocks, we did some, how do you say? Some pigeons.”
“Rock dove,” Santo Domingo says, “really does just sound so much nicer.”