Claire Foy was known for a register of restraint: a queen with a crown too heavy in The Crown, a woman who weighs every word in Women Talking. For the opening of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, on Tuesday 2 September, the British actress chose an altogether different vocabulary, rarer for her on screen as on red carpets: that of unabashed sparkle.
A two-time Emmy Award winner and Golden Globe holder, Claire Foy walked the Lido red carpet for the world premiere of Ink, Danny Boyle’s new film in which she holds the lead role. For this highly anticipated opening of the 83rd Festival, she had chosen to wear a selection of pieces by Swarovski, the Austrian house founded in 1895 and, in a little over a century, become one of the world’s great names in crystal.
The choice is anything but incidental in the calendar of jewellery houses, for whom the Mostra, alongside Cannes a few months earlier, is one of the rare moments when cinema and jewellery-making meet under the same spotlight. Swarovski sees in it a way of reaffirming an identity built as much on technical precision as on accessibility: the brand today claims more than 2,300 boutiques across some 140 countries, a network that sets it apart from most high jewellery houses both in scale and reach.
This taste for measured sparkle is not merely a matter of communication. Since 1895, the family business based in Austrian Tyrol has built its reputation on mastery of cut crystal, before extending its know-how to laboratory-grown diamonds and zirconia, then to accessories and home decor. It now belongs to a wider group, alongside Swarovski Optik, a specialist in optical instruments, and Tyrolit, an abrasives manufacturer — an industrial architecture that speaks to the diversity of a name the general public most often associates with runways and red carpets.
For several years now, the house has also highlighted work on circular innovation and support for environmental and social associations through the Swarovski Foundation — a way of justifying its repeated presence at moments as exposed as the Mostra’s openings, where image counts as much as gesture.
Still, on the Lido this 2 September, what played out first was an encounter: that of an actress known for the sobriety of her choices and a house whose craft consists, precisely, in making things sparkle. The film Ink promises, if early word is to be believed, a role against type for Claire Foy. The red carpet, for its part, offered a first clue to this shift, even before the screening.
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