What’s your golden thread count?

Maria Fitzpatrick

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

It takes a cool head, not just a steady hand, to weave the finest yarns. But when the “fabric” is made from literal gold threads, it requires a leap of faith too. “The problem-solving aspect is very exciting, but I do have to be in the right frame of mind or I start to unravel,” says London-based jeweller Megan Brown, of creating her intricate earrings and bombé rings.

As a child, Brown spent hours transfixed by the looms at Alfred Brown textile mills, a business founded in 1915 by her great-great-grandfather, and now a world-renowned weavers supplying not only Savile Row tailors but Prada, Saint Laurent, Victoria Beckham and Dolce & Gabbana. It was somewhat inevitable that the designer, who has received mentoring and sponsorship from Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation, would do something with fabric. “I started out in fashion, but I quickly realised that the sculptural forms for the body that interested me were getting smaller and smaller, and more fluid,” she says. “It dawned on me that I was trying to create fabric in jewellery form.”

Chris Davies pearl and hematite Paris To Seville ruffled collier, $22,000

Mason and Books gold and diamond Chiffon Bow earrings, $4,960

Fine jewellery is awash with sensuous ribbon and bow motifs, and references to dressmaking and to materials such as chiffon and taffeta; while silken cords and fabric components are appearing in lieu of precious-metal bracelets and chains.

Chris Davies’s jewellery behaves like it has been cut by a couturier

Antwerp-based Stephanie Schneider, who studied fashion and textile design, and worked for designers including Hussein Chalayan, has been creating jewellery that mimics the intricate construction of fabric for almost two decades. Now stocked in Liberty, Schneider’s work combines mohair yarn, silk threads and linen in pieces with traditional jewellers’ chains and diamonds, weaving them together using specialist textile techniques. She, like Brown, puts the new momentum down to a wider appreciation of highly skilled, craft-led work as a signifier of true luxury.

It chimes with analysis from The Future Laboratory identifying a macrotrend – “luxury recrafted” – as a key driver for appealing to the next generation, who are “obsessed with heritage and savoir-faire”, explains director of foresight Fiona Harkin. “Young affluents” not only respond more to “craft-centric communication”, she reports, but see themselves as “connoisseurs and collectors instead of consumers; and as guardians of craftsmanship and provenance”.

Chanel white-gold, diamond and blue lacquer Haute Joaillerie Sport ring, POA

Jessica McCormack gold, diamond, sapphire and emerald Chevron Tapestry bracelet, from £42,000

Victoire de Castellane, undoubtedly the flagbearer for the fabric theme, has drawn on the natural “dialogue between jewellery and couture” throughout her tenure at Dior, celebrating the maison’s heritage by exploring aspects of fabric and the virtuoso skill it takes to work it. She has played with pleats, mimicked the delicacy of lace, conjured the drama of draped taffeta and even transposed flat fabric patterns, such as tie-dye, into 3D gem-set optical illusions.

This year she has once again drawn on passementerie – decorative trimmings such as tassels, braid and fringing – for new Galons Dior pieces. Meanwhile a My Dior collection, launching this month, of openwork-mesh rings, earrings and bracelets highlights the iconic “cannage” motif, the maison’s signature quilting (most famously on the Lady Dior bag), which itself stemmed from the graphic cane-work pattern on the Napoleon III chairs in Christian Dior’s salons.

Chanel has evoked the texture and geometry of tweeds in recent high-jewellery collections, but performed an exciting about-turn this summer with an audacious ode to the maison’s vintage sporting sensibility, including precious mesh-construction elements inspired by athletic fabrics and a “freedom of movement”. Japanese house Mikimoto has used delicate pearls to create the effect of lace in collars and earrings, as seen on Michelle Yeoh at its Paris couture presentation, while London-based Jessica McCormack mimics tapestry inspired by friendship bracelets for a series of articulated cuffs made with sapphires, diamonds and emeralds.

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Venerated New York jeweller Chris Davies, an alumnus of Parsons School of Design, fuses a passion for dance with formal dressmaking techniques to create highly distinctive jewellery that behaves on the body like fabric that has been cut, draped and fitted by a couturier. What began with a single supple “rope” form woven from pearls has evolved into a signature technique that riffs on granulation. “Traditional jewellery can feel hard and cold,” he says. “It almost creates a bracing feeling when you put it on. I realised I could create a weighted fabric with an organic sensuality, a softness and warmth that feels soothing on the skin. This way the jewels aren’t associated with an event-based memory, but a sensory, emotional one.”