Georg Jensen and Sophie Bille Brahe's pared-back diamond jewellery champions Scandinavian style

When it came to finding a collaborator for its new gold and diamond jewellery collection, there was only one name on Danish design house Georg Jensen’s list: Sophie Bille Brahe. Since launching her brand in 2011, the contemporary Copenhagen-based jeweller has built a cult-like following for her minimalist take on fine jewellery: an aesthetic she brings to the new Halo collection, which blends Georg Jensen’s looping organic circles with Bille Brahe’s precise diamond pavé.

Bille Brahe didn’t have to be asked twice. “Georg Jensen has had a huge impact on what Scandinavian jewellery is today, and that legacy of craft and design,” she said at the launch of the collaboration during Copenhagen Fashion Week. “Everybody in Denmark has a story that involves Georg Jensen and it’s something all Danish people are incredibly proud of. It wasn’t something I could say no to.”

A trip to the Georg Jensen archive in the loft of its Copenhagen HQ - a space deemed so important to the country’s cultural history that it must remain in Denmark even if the company is sold - saw Bille Brahe sort through some of the 2,500 samples and 20,000 sketches to get an idea of the personalities and ‘handwriting’ of various designers over its 114-year history.

“Instead of being inspired by something specific, I wanted to find a space I could fill out,” she explains. An oversized, swooping silver ear cuff provided a starting point for a collection that was more effortless and easily wearable, while maintaining the organic shapes so crucial to Georg Jensen’s design DNA.

Keen to keep a Scandinavian sensibility in mind, she also sought inspiration from the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammersh?i: “the way he paints sunlight passing through the window, you can almost see the dust dancing”.

The resulting 19-piece Halo collection is a tour de force in precious minimalism. Sharp, flat-edged circles loop in pairs around earlobes, fingers and wrists, sometimes in pared-back plain gold, sometimes blanketed with the meticulous brilliant-cut diamond pavé that Bille Brahe’s band of devotees will recognise as being a subtle signature of her work.

18ct gold and diamond earrings, ￡5,300, Georg Jensen

“It was important that it was visibly me but also visibly Georg Jensen,” Bille Brahe explains. “Georg Jensen is very soft, whereas my own work is more ‘zppp, zppp’,” - she slashes her hand through the air at right angles to illustrate the onomatopoeic language she often uses to describe her designs - “so a circle was the perfect shape to work with because it’s soft and sculptural, but it can be very clean and geometric at the same time”.

Occasionally within these circles balances a single brilliant-cut diamond: Bille Brahe’s take on the floating diamond, a design trope previously anathema to the designer. “I like to take an element of something I don’t like and turn it into something I would wear and enjoy - I did it with pearls, which I never liked, and my tennis bracelet - I’d never seen one I wanted to wear.”

18ct gold and diamond Halo earrings, ￡650, Georg Jensen

The floating diamonds came as a surprise to Nicholas Manville, Georg Jensen’s senior vice president of design, who had given Bille Brahe carte blanche on the company’s first jewellery collection to be forged solely in 18ct gold and diamonds.

“It’s more rigid and graphic than I thought it would be, but it was a pleasant surprise,” he says. “We wanted to treat gold and diamond in a Scandinavian way - not too flashy, but with warmth and glow. It’s a subtle exercise that probably only another Scandinavian designer would understand. We knew Sophie would treat it with a lighter touch.”

For Bille Brahe, the subtlest variations in size and scale make the biggest impact when it comes to styling her jewellery. “People always ask me about being a Scandinavian jeweller and I’ve never really seen my work as being ‘Scandinavian’, but I suppose it is quite,” she reflects. “Even though the floating diamonds are actually quite big they don’t seem vulgar. Everything is toned down and that also reflects the very specific type of Nordic light.”

18ct gold and diamond Halo bangle, ￡8,800, Georg Jensen

The collection is a radical departure from Georg Jensen’s previous jewellery: daintier, more everyday and far more commercial than the sculptural Lamellae range, designed in collaboration with the late architect Zaha Hadid, and more contemporary than Dew Drop or Savannah, based on archive Vivianna Torun designs. It will doubtless bring the company to the attention of Bille Brahe’s fashionable following - far removed from their grandmother’s silver.

But, insists Manville, Halo contains all the elements that were close to the heart of the brand’s founder. “We always talk about the way light is absorbed, for any product,” he says. “The way the diamonds are set and the overall effect they create is very warm. They glow, rather than shine - it creates the same effect as the hammer marks in the silver.”

From ￡650; georgjensen.com

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