From Van Cleef & Arpels’ love for dance to Web3 and storytelling, the brand’s President and CEO talks about his contribution to the prestigious jeweller
In May this year, jeweller Van Cleef & Arpels reinforced its ties to the dance world with a new Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, an initiative first launched in 2020. This year’s festival was presented in Hong Kong in collaboration with the French May Arts Festival, and featured a rich programme including traditional and contemporary dance performances, creative workshops and collaborative experiences with local dancers.
The brand has been actively supportive of the dance world since 1967, when Claude Arpels worked with choreographer George Balanchine on the ballet Jewels; and that same spirit carries on today in its president and CEO Nicolas Bos.
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Dance has been important to Van Cleef & Arpels for decades: the founders loved ballet, the first dancer clips were launched in 1941 and, to this day, there have been important brand initiatives tied to dance. How will the art of dance continue to figure into your brand strategy now and in the future?
It’s more a matter of identity than strategy. Dance has been a component of our identity, a source of inspiration, an artistic category, and we love to work with choreographers, institutions and dancers [in the hopes that] we don’t only take inspiration from their work, but that we can also try to inspire them. Very importantly, through this new programme, Dance Reflections, that we started in 2020, we want to extend international support towards contemporary dance.
It’s around the idea of supporting creation, but also supporting transmission and education in the field of dance and choreography, and trying to provide opportunities for very diverse audiences around the world to get access to important pieces of choreography, from the repertoire of modern and contemporary dance from the Seventies to [what we have] today, from the neoclassical to very avant garde, sometimes experimental works. We would love the audience to really understand that, to witness it, to enjoy it; and we try as much as we can, together with the artist, to organise masterclasses [and] talks so that the audience can dive into the mind of the artist.
How would you say you’re factoring in the public’s interest in technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual or augmented reality, and Web3? Does new technology have any place in your marketing strategy and connecting with today’s consumer?
So far, it’s not been tied in so much. It’s definitely something that we look at with great interest because this is ... the world we live in. But I think we are really in a world of real reality, with genuine pieces of authentic materials, where the role of human beings is absolutely paramount—the importance of the handmade, of tradition in the workshop, even of hand-drawing in the studio. So, it’s not only about nostalgia or about preserving tradition, it’s also about a feeling or sometimes a certainty that there are few things that you can still do better with your eye, your hands and a pencil, and a few tools, than you can do with the best technology available.