There are houses that shape matter and others that venture to sculpt what has none. From its manufacture in Alsace, Lalique belongs to the second category: from September 2026, it unveils the second chapter of Air de Lalique, a collection that gives crystal form to three states of air — flight, play, breath.
A century-old obsession
Founded in 1888 by René Lalique, the house first made its name in jewellery before making glass and crystal its almost exclusive territory of expression in the interwar period. This shift from one art to another — from worn jewel to crystal objet — has always rested on the same guiding idea: to give a material presence to what, in nature, precisely escapes the eye. The flight of a bird, the course of water, the structure of a flower. Air de Lalique Chapitre II continues this vein by tackling, this time, air itself, that matter one never sees and feels only when it moves.
Papillons, suspended memory
The first part of this chapter calls on a motif long present in the house’s history: the butterfly, which René Lalique had already carried onto his perfume bottles and jewels at the turn of the twentieth century. A century later, the house brings it back in a new form — a swarm of crystal butterflies, caught at the precise instant when flight seems suspended. The exercise is anything but trivial: capturing movement in a mineral material, motionless by nature, is one of the tours de force Lalique has regularly set itself for a century. Here, the insect is not represented but evoked in its trajectory, as if the gesture of flight had been frozen at the exact moment of its grace.
Teddy Air, pop revisited
The second movement of the collection is more surprising. Teddy Air abandons the naturalist register for a form borrowed from childhood and play: the inflatable balloon, reinterpreted as a neo-pop sculpture. The choice reveals a broader evolution at Lalique, which for some seasons has allowed itself forays into a more playful, almost irreverent register, without giving up the exacting standards of hand-blown and hand-cut crystal. Teddy Air is neither a utilitarian object nor a simple trinket: it is a piece that accepts to make one smile, which, in the hushed vocabulary of fine crystalware, is a gesture in itself.
Alizé, when crystal becomes light
Third and final movement of this chapter, the Alizé lighting collection closes the loop by approaching air from its most discreet angle: the breeze. Here, crystal no longer seeks to represent movement, it seeks to produce it — through the way it captures, refracts and diffuses light. The pieces play on worked surfaces to suggest the undulation of a light breath, the material becoming simultaneously source and vector of light, halfway between the objet d’art and the functional light fitting.
The workshop, last guardian of the gesture
This triptych would not exist without Lalique’s historic manufacture, established in Alsace since 1921, where each piece continues to be shaped by hand — blowing, moulding, cutting and polishing all falling under a savoir-faire that the house claims as its main line of defence against the industrialisation of the luxury sector. Air de Lalique Chapitre II is therefore not merely an exercise in style: it is a demonstration, a way of recalling that the house continues to make most of its collection in the same workshops as a century ago.
A question remains, almost childlike, which the collection itself seems to pose without answering: after the butterfly and the balloon, what other form of air will Lalique choose to freeze in crystal? The wind, perhaps. Or silence.
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