One of the world’s largest watch and jewellery shows is throwing its weight behind a group highlighting ethical issues facing the industry.
EVENTS
Baselworld Supports ‘Reponsible’ Jewellery
This is the featured image caption
Credit: This is the featured image credit
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
One of the world’s largest watch and jewellery shows is throwing its weight behind a group highlighting ethical issues facing the industry.
One of the world’s largest watch and jewellery shows is throwing its weight behind a group highlighting ethical issues facing the industry.
Baselword has pledged official support for the Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC), whose aim is to promote ethical practices throughout the jewellery supply chain.
The RJC expressed their delight at the opportunity to work in partnership with the world-famous jewellery trade show: “…with its 100,700 trade buyers from 100 countries, [Baselworld] is the perfect platform for the RJC to reach a wide breadth of the industry with its message of responsible business practices backed by independent, third-party audits.”
Jewellery companies can apply to the RJC for third party certification, which will surely become central to ensuring the “consumer confidence” which Michael Rae, CEO of the RJC said was key to what the partnership could offer exhibitors.
Consumer confidence is indeed crucial at a time when public attention has been drawn to the issues of blood diamonds; the use of dangerous child labour; the environmental problems surrounding open pit mining and the river pollution caused by the mercury and cyanide used in processing gold.
It seems possible that with official backing from Baselworld, such certification may one day become compulsory.
Cynics may argue that this is little more than a token publicity stunt, but regardless of how much substance will accompany Baselworld’s stance, the move certainly mirrors an increased consumer awareness of the ethical issues surrounding the jewellery trade.
Sources
National Geographic
Israeli Diamond Industry
Daily Mail
