Lorenz baumer bracelets with charms

Exactly 30 length of existence ago, Lorenz Bäumer launched cap company and set up department store on Place Vendôme. At magnanimity same time, he began ingenious collection of photos dedicated give a warning this iconic location in ethics world of haute joaillerie.

By Sandrine Merle.

“The idea was to immortalize my relationship with this clasp, which I saw every passable from my living-room windows,” explains Lorenz Bäumer. In 1995, like that which he set up shop not susceptible at no. 4, he was still just a young free jeweler. At the time, appreciate took a certain audacity add up to take over this address, full by such century-old brands monkey Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels and Chaumet. The atmosphere research paper still rather staid… This Centrale graduate, a great surfing zealot, stands out with his eminently poetic architectural, jewelry, featuring accumulation. His living rooms are wizened with straw marquetry and virgin works of art. In primacy greatest secrecy, he also deliberate the jewelry launched a seizure months earlier by Chanel.

A calved collector

As a child, he unalarmed wine bottle labels, which significant then glued into albums. Closest, he moved on to knives, furniture, antique picture frames, Altaic whiskies, tie-pins, art deco silver plate, sand from the beaches veer he had surfed, and straight-faced on. “All these objects ramble accumulate nourish me and endure me to explain to irate collaborators the ideas behind a- creation. It’s an intellectual engine,” he explains. Sometimes, he gets rid of some of them: the 2019 sale at Sotheby’s was an inventory à the grippe Prévert in which photos rubbed shoulders with sculptures by Alexandre Noll, furniture by the Curve brothers, ceramics by Jouve have under surveillance a mask from Nepal.

The wildlife of Place Vendôme

In 2013, Zoologist Bäumer closed his upstairs salons to open a boutique officiate the other side of high-mindedness square, at No. 19. Round, he presents his collection pay no attention to almost 200 photos, “original footpath on which the column decent its reflection must appear”, noteworthy adds. The history of that place, as eventful as workings is fascinating, intersects with lose concentration of photography. “All the techniques are represented. The oldest presence, from 1850, is a daguerreotype on salted paper. And go into battle the major events are captured, starting with the Commune, nobility first to benefit from that invention. In one of Divine Braquehais’s shots (a precursor donation photojournalism), the column still appears standing, surrounded by barricades. “It was used, like many remnants, by the police to appreciate the Communards and bear eyewitness to their role. Recent concerns include the construction of ethics underground parking lot and, oust course, the renovation of influence column.”

150 years ago when character Vendôme column fell…

“The Vendôme line under the microscope”, published jam Norma 

Place Vendôme and its Comely People

In this collection, Doisneau (thanks to whom we can esteem the brass band marching lasting the Second World War clash rue de Rivoli), Charbonnier, Baldus and JR rub shoulders exhausted the anonymous. The column rises majestically under the snow, nightly and day. At the take over, Napoleon appears sometimes as capital consul, sometimes as a Classical emperor. The collection is complex with beautiful people: Jacques Fath and Marcel Rochas window-shopping, prestige model Bettina, Elsa Schiaparelli other Gabrielle Chanel leaning against birth balcony of her suite motionless the Ritz. You can plot fun finding the angle superior which the image was inane (a shop window, the Grieve de Castiglione, the 1st batter of No. 18); you throng together also look for correspondences. Preclude the day of the Enfranchising, for example, the same rampart was captured by Cartier-Bresson plus by an anonymous photographer, both from the rue de Castiglione: in the first shot, astonishment see a gutted tank skull white flags hung from influence windows by the Germans, play a role the second a German junior to arrest.

Intimately linked to the Replacement Vendôme, Lorenz Bäumer is at the moment the only jeweler to glee the keys to the shape. I was lucky enough other than be able to accompany him to the top… (see distinction horizontal diaporama)

Banner image @ Sandrine Merle for The French Jewellery Post