A collection of rare scarabs, long kept in the drawers of the Deyrolle house in Paris, serves as the starting point for Cosmic Guardians, the new collection from LITO Fine Jewelry. The Greek designer Lito Karakostanoglou extends a tradition older than it appears: that of the cabinet of curiosities turned into adornment.
In the history of Western jewellery there is a discreet but tenacious vein: that of setting the living, or what remains of it, rather than the precious stone alone. Egyptian scarabs, René Lalique’s Art Nouveau insects and nineteenth-century naturalist compositions belong to this lineage. With Cosmic Guardians, LITO Fine Jewelry openly joins it, starting from an unusual source: a collection of preserved rare scarabs from the famous Parisian house Deyrolle, a historic reference in taxidermy and cabinets of curiosities since 1831.
The designer Lito Karakostanoglou does not seek to imitate nature, but to make it converse with precious metal. Each preserved scarab is set in an 18-carat gold structure that protects its natural iridescence without ever covering it. The result comes as earrings, rings, bracelets, a choker, a brooch and a diadem, where the brilliance of the gold and the purity of the diamonds and precious stones border the insect’s carapace without overwhelming it. The house speaks of a dialogue between organic form and artisanal savoir-faire; one could also see in it a rather rare form of respect for the raw material, since these are specimens already preserved rather than collected for the occasion.
The choice of the scarab is not trivial. A symbol of transformation and rebirth since ancient Egypt, the insect embodies here the tension between strength and fragility that the collection claims. LITO makes of it a contemporary allegory, that of a natural world both threatened and bearing a power of regeneration, which each jewel is meant to recall on the wrist or at the ear rather than illustrate literally.
The collection’s most singular gesture perhaps lies less in the jewels themselves than in what accompanies them. Each piece is delivered with its guarantee card, but also with a porcelain habitat designed and handmade by the ceramist Diane Alexandre, a sculptural case that turns the object into a piece of contemplation as much as an accessory. This attention to the container, almost as much as to the jewel itself, is a reminder that Cosmic Guardians is conceived less as a seasonal collection than as a series of small contemporary reliquaries.
It remains to be seen whether this cabinet-of-curiosities aesthetic, long confined to the most experimental margins of jewellery, will find a wider echo among a clientele that is rediscovering, elsewhere in luxury, a taste for the rare object and its natural history.
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