The house founded in London in 1996 launches Pearls of Wisdom, a capsule of shoes and bags designed by Sandra Choi. The pearl is presented as a code of the house; the materials are barely described.
Jimmy Choo was born in 1996 as a workshop in London’s East End. The house ties the pearl to its history from the very first boutiques, from the alabaster travertine walls to the oyster-shell-coloured packaging. For its thirtieth anniversary, creative director Sandra Choi draws a capsule from it, Pearls of Wisdom, accompanied by a campaign.
The models are named one by one. The gold wedge ITHACA, named after a Greek island, carries three resin pearls under the foot. The IRINA sandal is covered in resin pearls and crystals arranged like layered necklaces, and the INGRID flat reworks an Oxford with a trompe-l’œil resin pearl buckle. The INES family offers baroque pearl bodices as a pump, a mule and a ballerina. As for bags, the BON BON echoes the bodices of the INES family, the TUBE MINI BAG and the RAINDROPS minaudière carry a fringe of resin pearls, the CLOUD evokes oyster shells and golden waves, and the OYSTER is a sculptural clutch in Plexiglas inspired by a baroque pearl.
The campaign alternates still lifes and images of models, in colour and in black and white. Its graphic design takes up the number ’96: its curves become two apostrophes, one straight, one inverted, superimposed on the moving images.
One observation emerges from the list of models. Resin is the only pearl material named, and it recurs for ITHACA, IRINA, INGRID, the TUBE MINI BAG and RAINDROPS. For INES and BON BON, the text does not say what the pearls are made of; CLOUD and OYSTER are described by their shape, the OYSTER being in Plexiglas. The house’s discourse, for its part, describes the pearl as precious and slowly shaped.
This is not a flaw: nothing announces fine pearls, and resin is a legitimate material for fringes or a sole trim. The gap is one of register. The metaphor speaks of rarity and slowness; the materials named say nothing of the kind. No price, no quantities and no availability schedule appear in the information received.
What the capsule establishes: an image code, the pearl and the number ’96, spread across nine models or families of models. What it does not establish: what, in these pieces, is precious.
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