Luxury is defined as a ‘great state of comfort or elegance.’ While some of us are capable of buying the world’s finest jewellery and wearing the most fashionable names on the planet, our pursuit of achieving the elegance or comfort we crave can often wind up fruitless.
To achieve luxury is to follow a complex formula; a recipe that carries aesthetic results. With this in mind, let’s take a look at your five-step luxury starter pack. Here, we can delve into some of the most exciting and prestigious brands of our time and explore how they achieve their delicate blend of practicality, understated elegance, confidence and raw beauty in five striking pieces:
PIAGET: WINGS OF LIGHT SECRET CENOTE CUFF WATCH
Featuring a striking blend of tropical blue and emerald tones, the Secret Cenote cuff watch from Piaget represents the brand’s horological heritage with a hard stone dial of Australian black opal recaptures the spirit of Piaget’s 1960’s and 70’s vintage. With Andy Warhol, who owned a tiger’s eye model, as a keen admirer at the time, the watch’s natural pallet has been complemented through diamonds and further channel-set opals and sapphires. The design of the piece is boldly asymmetrical – further underlining the chaotic natural beauty of the nature that’s inspired the timepiece.
DOLCE & GABBANA: ALTA GIOIELLERIA PEONY EARRINGS
In a world that’s spent much of the past year in isolation, there’s something exceptionally charming about Dolce & Gabbana’s Italian-holiday-inspired Alta Gioielleria collection. With their striking and contrasting colours, the Alta Gioielleria collection’s peony earrings are the stand-out creation here. Crafted from gold and hand-painted with enamel, the earrings are fashioned around gold corollas and tipped with both diamonds and sapphires. Each piece showcases a rich blue Tanzanite drop and is complemented with a yellow sapphire. The final product is a design that looks so impressive the designers themselves admit that it sometimes gets mistaken for costume jewellery. The sunkissed effect on the petals of the peony earrings appears to be so natural that they could easily transport the mind to a summertime Tuscan village scene – even when caught up in lockdown.
MARIA KREYN: FINE ART FROM THE NEW OLD MASTER
Very few prestigious items can match the comfort and elegant connotations of luxury better than the works of Maria Kreyn. Emulating the style of the old masters but with a more contorted and animalistic twist, Kreyn looks to distort our perceptions of fine art and create something altogether refreshing and new from the classic origins of her painting. Born in Russia and now living in New York, Kreyn has managed to blend the comforting tranquillity of the old masters with a running theme of unnerving peculiarities in her work. At a time when investing in fine art could be a solid proposition as opposed to buying into stocks and shares, investing in new old masters like Maria Kreyn could represent a smart and luxurious way of managing your wealth.
CRAFT IRISH WHISKEY: THE DEVIL’S KEEP
Luxury comes in many forms, and in the case of Craft Irish Whiskey’s triple distilled, triple oaked and inimitable Devil’s Keep, it’s very much bottleable too. The Devil’s Keep takes the world of premium craft whiskey to new heights. Boasting a contemporary flavour that began its journey in 1991 when it was initially distilled, this whiskey is extremely scarce – with only 333 bottles in existence and a premium sized €10,000 price tag to boot. Perfection is an exclusive club, and Craft Irish Whiskey have demonstrated this by limiting their supply of The Devil’s Keep to just 333 perfect bottles – each brimful of presence, significance and emotion. However, in the world of luxury living, quality always means a whole lot more than quantity. The painstaking care, commitment and longevity of The Devil’s Keep truly sets it apart from other mass distilled whiskies. To buy a bottle is to embark on a journey in which very few others have ventured.
TRULY EXQUISITE: LUXURY CUSTOMISED IPHONE
It can be exceptionally difficult to find luxury in our most commonplace everyday objects, but Truly Exquisite is a brand that can help products as mundane as our smartphones truly stand out from the crowd with elegant and non-intrusive designs. To celebrate the arrival of the iPhone X, Truly Exquisite created a range of customised models featuring luxury 24 Karat gold plating, mother of pearl designs as well as carbon fibre, lizard and crocodile skin finishes. Truly Exquisite’s team of highly skilled designers are capable of creating bespoke engravings and their services extend to a vast range of electrical devices that also includes tablets and games consoles. Buying customised smartphone covers is rarely seen as a luxurious endeavour, but Truly Exquisite understands the power of simplicity and lets their precious material designs speak for themselves. Notably, the brand’s mother of pearl finish implements an unignorable level of beauty on the device that many of us spend the most time using throughout our daily lives.
Luxury may be difficult for designers to pin down, but when it’s done right, it can be a joy to behold through its unparalleled beauty and comfort. With this starter pack, you can ensure that you’re ready to let the luxury flow in just about any situation throughout your life.