VAN CLEEF & ARPELS’ philosophy on jewellery runs on a fairly specific argument: that the art form, beyond its decorative and sentimental values, is evidence of our shared humanity. It represents beliefs, kinship, status, memory and all the things people have desired to express without saying out loud.

L’ÉCOLE School of Jewelry Arts, founded by the maison in Paris in 2012 and funded by it in full, operates on that premise at arm’s length from the brand itself. It’s also taking this lesson around the world, using immersion as a teaching technique to open up the language of jewellery to a broader audience, using transmission as the bridge to connect cultures. 

Since 2014, its Nomadic School has carried the argument to Hong Kong, Dubai, New York, Tokyo and Lyon, three of which later grew into permanent campuses. This year, for the first time, it landed in Seoul.

The distance from the brand is deliberate. It allows the art form to have its own voice, not solely that of Van Cleef & Arpels, although the Maison will often comes up naturally classes on gemstones or high jewellery creations. But in others, explains Lise Macdonald, President of L’ECOLE School of Jewelry Arts, it may not be mentioned at all. “It’s super important that we keep this freedom not to speak of the Maison when it’s not relevant, or to speak of the Maison when it is relevant, because we are an institution that speaks for jewellery culture at large,” Macdonald tells Esquire. 

Our interview is taking place inside one of the current  “classrooms” set up inside of Futura Seoul, a brutalist concrete slab of an art gallery set down in Bukchon, the neighbourhood where hanok houses have stood under ridged tile roofs for centuries and the location for L’ECOLE School of Jewellery Arts Nomadic School’s Korea residency.

Downstairs, part of the gallery has been transformed into The Garden of Emeralds, a fiery green fantasy dedicated to the use of the stone in jewellery throughout the centuries. Rings carved with cameos of Catherine the Great; a Mughal engraved emerald from 18th century along with uncut versions of the precious gem. Anyone with an interest was able to come in and visit the exhibit, or buy tickets to take classes and discover the intricacies of jewellery craftsmanship. 

These experiences speak to Macdonald’s point that L’ECOLE School of Jewelry Arts Nomadic School addresses one of the barriers into the rarified world of jewellery. “When we opened fourteen, fifteen years ago, the world of jewellery culture in France at that time was considered very closed,” Macdonald says. 

“It was really the world for a specific sector of society.” 

There was a sense of a closed door to the world of jewellery, she explains. One that Van Cleef & Arpels has become determined to swing open, inviting everyone to both enjoy and learn more about jewellery as a specific art form. “So we suddenly had a mission, which we continue to have, to be as inclusive as possible and less intimidating.”

That inclusivity is built into how the classes actually run.

“We have a maximum of twelve students, two teachers [for each class],” Macdonald says, “so that you have this very close relationship with your students, and learning by doing.” Nothing is taken purely on faith. “There is a memory, not just a cerebral memory. You understand and learn through the hand, through the interaction, through the eye, through the observation, through listening.” Some courses, she says, start with sound alone, no visuals at all, so students learn to listen for what they’d otherwise only look at.

The nomadic nature of the school also does something specific to the practice of transmission, according to Maconald, beyond simply reaching a new city. 

“Decentralising yourself helps you centralise, refocus more accurately,” she says. Taking L’ECOLE School of Jewelry Arts residency in Korea as an example, she describes the experience as a juncture that sets two cultures’ craftsmanship side by side rather than teaching both histories in isolation. Listening to another tradition, she argued, sharpens the view of your own, a small piece of logic that explains why the school keeps moving rather than expanding one campus indefinitely.

She’s also plain about what jewellery is, once stripped of the assumption that it means diamonds. “With its own grammars and wordings,” she said, “it is a common thread to humanity.” Feathers, thread, base metal, all of it counts, and the category as a whole, she suggested, has more to say about people generally than any single high jewellery piece does on its own.

You could see this literally within one of the immersions, a reconstruction project built on early European goldsmithing, worked without modern tools and set in dialogue with Korean gold craftsmanship on the surrounding walls. It depicted how contemporary artisans had worked to revive the lost practices of Celtic goldsmiths to create a torque, whose working nature of closures and clasps been a mystery until recently. 

“[Jewellry] is a working out the work of the hand,” Macdonald said, “putting yourself in the conditions of the time, in a space that’s not your reference.” The point, for her, wasn’t nostalgia. “It helps contemporary creations to not lose techniques and to continue to be nurtured by the past.”

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