From Venice with Love

PALOMA PICASSO, jewellery designer and daughter of the famed painter, visits Beijing for the first time to introduce her Venezia collection for Tiffany & Co. vivienne tang sits down with the style maven to discuss the beauty of Venice, childhood memories and her signature colour, red

I’M ON THE mezzanine floor in the Tiffany & Co. China World boutique in Beijing when the store’s staff scurry past me to finalise preparations for the arrival of Paloma Picasso, who’s not only one of the brand’s long-time designers but also the daughter of Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot. The frenzy is contagious, and I find my calmness morphing into a cocktail of nervousness, excitement and apprehension.

The behaviour of the staff and the boldness of Picasso’s jewellery designs have led me to expect a woman with an intimidating physical presence, but her petite frame and elegantly charming poise take me by surprise.

Picasso, 62, is here to become more familiar with her Chinese clientele and to introduce her latest collection, Venezia. Highly sophisticated and extremely PR-savvy, she no doubt has been asked the same questions over and over again about her family background and her beginnings in jewellery, but she’s game and happily elaborates.

As we gather around a coffee table, a staff member and I compliment Picasso on her beautiful necklace. “I designed it,” she says in her pan-European accent with an endearing giggle, which reminds me of the laugh of an innocent girl. She seems young at heart, despite her age, and she’s not afraid to show it.

“Participating in the growth of the company has been really interesting,” she says about having designed for Tiffany & Co. for 32 years. “I’ve been exposed to different cultures and I’ve learnt that the tastes are very different. Actually, what I find interesting is the resistance of certain markets. I have a tendency to do big drawings. Little by little I got my own fans, and what seemed to be a resistance in the beginning became a big plus, because people would say, ‘If you want big pieces, go to Paloma Picasso.’ ”

Her seemingly endless source of ideas enables her to release 10 to 20 new pieces every year. Her unique colour combinations and use of gold and gemstones such as blue tanzanite, citrine, kunzite, carnelian and quartz have quickly garnered her a loyal following, even among Tiffany lovers who were attracted to the brand for its diamond and silver pieces. She has made graphic elements such as her signature Xs and graffiti scribbles her own, and dove collection has become her hallmark. (Paloma means “dove” in Spanish. She was born a day before the International Peace Conference in Paris for which her father designed the famous dove symbol.)

Picasso was immersed in art when she was growing up, thanks to her painter parents, and she seemed destined to express her creativity and talent, even if she might have felt the burden of being compared to her father on a professional level. And despite the fact that there is no escaping the powerful influence of the Picasso name, she has undoubtedly become an artist in her own right who has left her mark on the jewellery scene with her extravagant designs.

“I think I was fortunate to grow up in a very artistic family, whether it was with my mother or my father,” she says. “And all their friends were in the arts, whether they were painters, too, or film-makers, musicians, you name it. It was a very uplifting environment for a child. I also think that at that time there was this idea that the quality, the innocence that you find in a child, is something to relish. All my father’s friends were very happy to have us participate. I would have my own shows with my own drawings, trying to sell them to my mother’s and father’s friends. And of course they felt obliged. They weren’t too expensive, a few cents. I was very fortunate to have a lot of freedom as a child, but also with the idea that it gave you a sense of responsibility that if you have more freedom, that you have to behave in a way.”

Picasso’s serendipitous career start was instigated by a theatre costumier when she was only 19 years old, and she quickly advanced in her métier to become something of an icon and a muse to Paris couturiers. “I was the assistant to the stage designer, and I was given the job to find a big necklace for the main character,” she recalls. “So I went to the flea market and bought some rhinestones that were on an outfit. I also bought some black velvet, and I sewed tons of rhinestones onto it. When the first article came out about the play, they talked about the actress, the play, and this and that. And the last phrase said, ‘Paloma Picasso made the necklace.’ In the same week, a friend of mine told me she had found a school where you learn how to make jewellery. The press was talking about it, so I thought I’d better go and learn it fast. That’s how it happened.”

It wasn’t long before Yves Saint Laurent invited her to create a jewellery collection for his couture house, and soon she was working for the Greek company Zolotas, where she perfected her skills and achieved further recognition. In 1980 she began her collaboration with Tiffany & Co. and launched her fragrance, Paloma Picasso, a brand that eventually was extended to include her trademark red lipstick.

“I tend to be drawn to the same kind of colours that Chinese people are drawn to,” she says about her choice of bold hues. “The reason why my books and brochures are red is because I used to be known for my red lipstick. That was way back, and at the time it was totally out of fashion. Actually it was at the same time when the colour Polaroids came out. On the Polaroid, the red comes out almost fluorescent. They would take Polaroids with flash, so my face would be all white with the black hair, the black eyes and wonderful red lips. What I liked about it was that they didn’t look like photographs. They looked more like drawings. After a few years of me wearing red lipstick, it came back into fashion. So then the press would come and ask me, because I was supposed to be the expert on red lipstick. When I launched my fragrance, of course I made my packaging red. All the ads were me with my red lips, and after 25 years of wearing red lipstick every day – and at that point there were always pictures of me all over the place – it got to be a bit too much. Once when I went out without red lipstick, I remember seeing two ladies in the street and one of them said, ‘Look, it’s Paloma Picasso.’ And the other one said, ‘No, it’s not possible. She’s not wearing red lipstick.’ So that’s my incognito look. And then I said, ‘I’ll wait until everybody knows that I don’t wear red lipstick, and then I’ll wear it again.’ ”

But red isn’t the only Chinese thing she’s attracted to. Her collections inspired by Marrakesh and Venice raise the possibility of future Beijing- or Shanghai- influenced jewellery pieces.

“I’m quite sure that we’ll see an Asian-influenced collection soon, because this is a very powerful trip for me,” she says about visiting Beijing for the first time. “I had already been to Shanghai four years ago. Then of course here, you get a bit more of the history. Most likely it will have an impact on my future work. But the next collection is basically already finished. As you know, I’ve done Marrakesh, which is where we have a home (in addition to Switzerland), and then I did Venice, which was such an important city for me growing up and defining my own style. So we thought that everyone is going to be waiting for the third city, but there will be no third city. We thought that we would get cornered otherwise. Then New York is going to say, ‘Well, after all, Tiffany is based here.’ So we said no more cities. It’s going to be a more floral-themed collection.”

For now, Picasso has her hands full promoting the Venezia collection, which takes hints from the ornate cast-iron gates, lanterns suspended from ceilings, gondola mooring poles and eight-pronged star motifs that are all found in Venetian architecture.

“I’ve been going there since I was a teenager,” she says of the floating city. “The experience of being there is like no other city because of the water. Many of the streets are actually covered canals. So walking in Venice at night…most of the tourists have gone, so the city is rather quiet, and as you walk, you hear your footsteps resonating, because you’re actually walking on something like a bridge. Noises are very special. Even though you’re walking a lot, you also get on boats to go to certain places. So you have this unsteadiness of being on the water, and sometimes even when you’re walking you feel like everything is dancing around you. There are so many layers of history. I think the city was founded in the ninth century. So you have Romanesque, and then you have Byzantine with San Marco. You have so many different styles. It’s like reading a book about architecture.”

As Picasso travels the world wearing and introducing her designs, she is her own best model and salesperson. She has won numerous awards, and her unique jewellery creations are showcased in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and Chicago’s Field Museum.

Does her wellspring of ideas ever run dry? “There’s always that fear,” she answers. “You always think, ‘Oh, maybe I can’t think of another piece.’ But somehow it hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully I’ll keep having ideas, and sometimes my husband is the one who says, ‘Why don’t you look in that direction.’ After I had done Marrakesh, he said, ‘Maybe you want to do a theme on another city.’ I’m sure he knew the answer to that already, but he didn’t say anything. So I picked Venice. I don’t think he was surprised.”