To mark the launch of Tangerine Sky, her debut high jewellery collection, Danish designer Sophie Bille Brahe talks Cy Twombly, Roman marble and making diamonds feel weightless
On a visit last year to her New York boutique, and with an hour free between meetings, Danish jewellery designer Sophie Bille Brahe popped into a Cy Twombly show at the neighbouring Gagosian. “I love Cy Twombly, he’s one of my favourite artists,” she reflects, “and when I was there, standing before a pink, splash-like canvas in the show, I turned to my friend and said, ‘Can you see it's a baked Alaska ring?’” Even if her friend wasn't sure she could, the following morning, waking at 3am, jetlagged and still under Twombly’s spell, Bille Brahe reached for the hotel notepad and sketched instantly the first three rings of what is now Tangerine Sky: her debut high jewellery collection, launching exclusively at Harrods.
The designer has always worked fast and intuitively. “I’m not a mood board person,” she says, “I always get a feeling and a fast idea. I very quickly know whether it’s good or not, and then after that, all the work comes.” Bille Brahe knew she wanted to make jewellery since she was a small girl, and when she was accepted into a school in London after finishing high school, she panicked. “I can’t do this,” she remembers thinking, “If I’m going to spend my life doing something, I need to have a craft, not just ideas.” Five years of training followed – “blistered fingers, technical drawing, measurements” – before a master’s at London’s Royal College of Art.
Tangerine Sky’s animating idea is weightlessness – a funny challenge for a craft so inherently dependent on hard, heavy gold and diamonds. Bille Brahe traces the impulse to a lifelong enchantment with Rome, a city both she and Twombly adored. “I love to see the marble sculptures when I’m there, where the hard, heavy marbles soften visually into the dress of a woman,” she muses. However heavy the stone – and some diamonds in the collection weigh up to an impressive five carats – there is a curvature of form that appears to swell then float upwards, much how Twombly lifted his furious scrawl lightly from the canvas.
Yet there’s a constant discipline underneath her apparent ease. “Some of the things that look the easiest are always the most difficult to produce,” she says, comparing it to a sweet held too long in the mouth – worn smooth, but never shapeless. The designer has always wanted her work to look industrial in its precision, even when handmade; the tension between the two is, for her, the whole of her creative practice. Motifs, like the ocean, that she returns to again and again, are pushed further here: in the Sky 2 ring, a fluid pavé of diamonds cascades into light, like water glistening; Sky 1 is carved and refined into a “wave kissing the little finger.”
Wearability, whether for her main line or this new high jewellery, has been a steadfast rule since the beginning of her career. Heart-shaped diamonds, for example, had long unsettled her despite being her favourite cut. “I just couldn’t see myself wearing one because it would be such a girly thing,” she laughs. Yet strung into her signature crescendo tennis collier, they became “cool and wearable”. At scale, in Tangerine Sky, her classic design is completed in brilliant-cut five to one carat diamonds – and still passed the test: “it was the first piece I finished and the first thing I did when I saw it completed was put it on. And it was perfect with just the T-shirt I was wearing.”
The final collection of eight pieces, comprising necklaces, rings, and earrings, launches exclusively at Harrods today but what endures is the life beyond the launch: Bille Brahe has never felt ownership over what she makes. “I never have the feeling that they are mine,” she says. “I’m just helping them out.” She speaks about diamonds the same way – as something temporarily held in her care, carrying memory forward, passed from hand to hand until they outlast everyone who ever wore them. A chapter, and never a final form. “We‘re lucky to be in their lives,” she says, “even for just a little bit.”
The Tangerine Sky collection is available exclusively at Sophie Bille Brahe and Harrods.
