In the opening scene of her 1920 novel Cheri, French writer Colette describes two lovers playfully squabbling over a precious pearl necklace. If ever there was a contemporary rendering of this object of desire, it would be conjured up by Elie Top, the Parisian designer whose pieces exude drama and complexity befitting a romantic tug of war. Pearls also played a pivotal role when the Lanvin accessories designer made his first solo venture into fine jewellery. His 2015 debut collection, Mecaniques Celestes, featured segmented orbs concealing diamonds and other gems. A symbol of the gravitational pull between two people, his Toi et Moi blackened silver ring has rotating spheres that hinge open to reveal a fragile white and grey pearl. Secret compartments are something of a theme.
"I wanted a story of movement and mystery, hiding and showing things," says the softly spoken designer. "Trying to find two different faces on the same jewel. When it's closed, it's bold and industrial. Inside, you have something a bit more poetic."
A fashion design alumnus of the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne – previous students include Karl Lagerfeld and Issey Miyake – Top had internships at Dior and Lacroix before joining Yves Saint Laurent in 1997 as an assistant. When the label was sold to the Gucci Group in 1999, Moroccan-Israeli designer Alber Elbaz was appointed creative director of the Rive Gauche line, with the master himself focusing on the twice-annual Haute Couture collections. He suggested Top, then 21, take a role working on the house's accessory and jewellery collections. "It was my learning years then, without going to school,", says Top. In 2001, he followed Elbaz to Lanvin, where he has been designing costume jewellery for close to 15 years now.
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It was also at YSL that Top met the late designer and muse Loulou de la Falaise, whose idiosyncratic approach to jewellery shaped his love for bold bijoux in diverse materials. "She'd mix diamond earrings with fruit and plastic," he says. "Style and real elegance come from that kind of freedom." In his own collection, high-carat diamonds and gemstones with natural inclusions are set in gold and silver, the latter tarnished in a complicated process where the metal is blackened before being partly polished.
"It was quite difficult honestly because I had been working with so many strong people for many years. I felt like I needed to say something by myself, so I had to go back to my roots," says Top, of launching his own brand.
Mustachioed and wearing a tailored three-piece suit, Top looks every part the Proustian flaneur of Belle Epoque Paris. In fact, he and his three sisters were raised closer to the English Channel, in a small village in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. With this industrial and agricultural vista as a backdrop, the young Top envisioned fantastical dwellings with turrets, spires and towers.
"I was always sketching fantasy castles and churches," he says. "It's the same way I work now, like I'm building something. Venice meets Versailles meets Linderhof in Germany. It's this strange mix between what I was seeing and what I was dreaming. I was always fond of maps, plans and things like that; I use that in my jewels."
Still an avid sketcher – he's only without a notebook during his summer vacation – Top finishes what he calls "the envelopes" (the exterior of his pieces) before deciding what to place in them. The chance discovery of a catalogue for an exhibition on Renaissance science piqued his interest in space and the cosmos. And so Top's yellow-gold and silver Scaphandre pendant opens to reveal a diamond-encrusted globe circled by precious satellites.
With the 11 permanent and five limited-edition pieces of Mecaniques Celestes, Top has established the cornerstones of his brand and its theme has fed into his second collection. Inspired by a 16th-century portrait of Ana de Mendoza, the Princess of Eboli, Top imagined the eyepatch-wearing Spanish aristocrat as a modern-day biker a la Mad Max. The resulting collection, Etoile Mysterieuse, combines his signature mechanics with the esoteric: a blackened silver and yellow-gold cuff is topped with a compass-like octagon on silver buttresses engraved to mimic vaulted cathedral ceilings. A talisman pendant sparkles with an onyx disc studded with gold stars and diamonds, all hidden beneath moving spheres.
Since 2015, Top has been working from his own atelier and showroom, which occupies a suite of chandelier-lit rooms in a first-floor walk-up nestled between Place Vendome and concept store Colette. "The inspiration was a strange mix, a bit like the jewels," he says of the striking interiors, created in collaboration with his partner, interior designer Vincent Darre. With walls painted in grey tones to match Parisian rooftops, carpets woven to resemble an intricate labyrinth, and furniture in the form of flea-market finds, the decor is typical of Top's calibrated sense of whimsy.
"You need to spend time to feel comfortable; something more luxurious than being in a shop," says the designer, conspiratorially. It is here that he discusses special commissions with clients, some of whom are male. And yet, unlike the virile titular character of Colette's novel, Monsieur Top does not wear jewellery himself. "I am not eccentric enough for that," he says. "But it's very good on rock stars."
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