nessy Louis Vuitton, Giorgio Bulgari has been steeped in jewelry since his childhood, but also in design. “My father was very much involved in the family busi- ness, and I was pretty mesmerized by his work,” he said, recalling Gianni Bulgari sketching anything from jewels and watches to car dashboards. “And that certainly had a strong influence on me when I was a kid.” Even so, the New York-born, Rome-raised jeweler, who studied art history and advertising at Boston University in the U.S., took a circuitous route back to the familiar fold of jewelry.
Four years in finance, working between New York and Mi- ami at the cusp of the 2000s, gave him “his independence.” But eventually, the call of jewels was stronger — although the first ones he worked on were of the mechanical kind, by heading to Switzerland to join his father Gianni Bul- gari, who’d gone into watchmaking in 1989. “I was very attracted to it because of its industrial design nature, and I thought I could pop down to Rome from time to time and follow up on the jewelry side,” he said. Even- tually, he worked with Ferragamo in 2011 on a fine-jew- elry line, tipping the scale definitively toward gemstones. In 2014, he joined Marina B as creative director and al- though his aunt had already exited the company, the creative process was very much a dialogue between the two of them, tapping into the brand’s archive and her “ex- traordinary style that was very much rooted in the Bulgari style, while being very identifiably [her own],” and giving them his spin. That said, Giorgio Bulgari isn’t about to rest on any fami- ly laurels. “I’m a fourth-generation jeweler, and I’ve been involved in this since my birth. I wouldn’t say it gives me legitimacy but [it] certainly casts a different perception,” he said. “There’s an element of trust, and [success] is in the relationship that one builds with a client.”
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