Trade war be damned, New York luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co. opened to the public Sept. 23 its largest jewelry exhibition in its 182-year history, in Shanghai. This project was 18 months in the making.

“Vision & Virtuosity” showcases Tiffany’s most spectacular jewelry creations, with 350 treasured pieces from its archives or acquired for the occasion, including the rare 128.54-carat yellow Tiffany diamond last seen on Lady Gaga at the Oscars.

“We may be a New York company but we are the global, next-generation luxury company,” Tiffany & Co. chief executive Alessandro Bogliolo said in his pre-opening speech Sept. 18 at the stunning bamboo-veiled Fosun Foundation building, the exhibit venue, just across the Huangpu River.

“The vibrancy of Shanghai and the Chinese consumer’s passion for luxury make it the fitting destination of an exhibition of this kind,” he said.

Despite reported dismal sales in the US owing to declining Chinese tourist spending, the trade war between China and the United States is “not really relevant,” Bogliolo told us in an interview.

In Asia, “just in the last quarter, we had more than 25 percent growth of the market in China,” Tiffany’s second biggest market after the US.

In the event, the brand announced the opening of two new Blue Box cafés, akin to the New York flagship—one in Shanghai and another in Hong Kong (again, civil unrest be damned).

These come on the heels of the recent openings of flagship stores in Beijing and Shanghai, and the launch of its e-commerce in China last July “and the marketing activities of which this one is the most important,” Bogliolo said of the grand exhibit.

Celebrity guest list

The preopening night of “Vision & Virtuosity” last Sept. 19 was attended by Brie Larson (“Captain Marvel”), Gong Li (“Memoirs of a Geisha”), Kim Tae-ri (Korean drama “Mr. Sunshine”) and a coterie of social media influencers.

It is unlike other high jewelry exhibits we have seen. While it offers mesmerizing precious objects—one room in the six-part, three-story showcase alone is devoted to diamond pieces—the presentation is a lot more playful and irreverent, and yes, designed with the ’Gram in mind. Tiffany, after all, fully embraces the peculiarities and ways of millennial and Gen Z customers.

Bogliolo credited his creative counterpart, chief artistic officer Reed Krakoff, for his ability to balance elegance and whimsy. The CEO cited the selfie-magnet supersized Tiffany Paper Cup and Blue Box in the last room of the exhibit.

Krakoff “really pushed it to the level of being, ‘oh my god, what?’ But it’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s these juxtaposition between the most famous diamond in the world and a [place] where you can come with your family and have a selfie,” Bogliolo said.

They’ve been working together since 2017 when they both joined the company.

“I believe that today, luxury doesn’t have to be formal and that even really precious things can be worn with ease and with a sense of confidence,” Krakoff said in a prepared statement. “I’m interested in recontextualizing and reconfiguring our designs to make them desirable in a world where you can wear an incredible diamond necklace with a T-shirt and a pair of jeans and look completely of-the-moment.”

Six chapters

The exhibit’s first section is an homage to blue, the brand’s signature color, featuring stones like sapphires, aquamarines, moonstones, tanzanites and rare blue diamonds, presented in recreated famous windows of the New York Fifth Avenue flagship.

On the same floor are various historical artifacts from the Tiffany archive—the first Blue Box, the first Blue Book catalog, and jewelry worn by Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor.

One room is devoted to the Blue Book Collection, Tiffany’s high jewelry masterpieces, including the 1845 Blue Book—the US’ first mail-order catalog— and one original piece from that collection.

There’s also a preview of the 2019 Blue Book Collection, to be launched in New York in a few weeks.

The adjoining room, awash in Tiffany Blue, is a love letter to engagement rings, which Tiffany has been known for in the last 130 years. The celebration of people’s love stories happens in a room blanketed with a canopy of Tiffany Paper Flowers cutouts, with floating glass discs bearing the classic Tiffany Setting solitaire diamond and the new Tiffany True engagement rings.

There’s a room where guests can try on diamond rings to indulge their fancies.

Fans of Holly Golightly will get to relive her Tiffany moment on another floor, where the façade of the Fifth Avenue flagship is recreated. With it are never-before-seen “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” memorabilia, including Audrey Hepburn’s very own annotated script, and a life-size reimagining by a Chinese artist of Golightly’s little black dress—in porcelain.

Again, it’s another selfie room, where even the celebrity guests took turns posing in the yellow cab installation.

“Long before experience was a concept, or even sponsorships, there was ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’… It was not a product placement. It just happened naturally. So it is this authenticity that is at the core of the brand,” said Bogliolo.

The revolving door of the ersatz flagship store leads to the “river of diamonds,” a salvo to founder Charles Lewis Tiffany, known in his time as the “king of diamonds.”

Tiffany claims to be the only luxury jeweler that cuts its own diamonds, with 1,500 in-house artisans, while others buy precut stones wholesale.

“If you’re a wholesaler of diamonds, what do you do?” Bogliolo asked rhetorically. “When you polish the diamond, you maximize the carat weight; at Tiffany, we maximize the symmetry. So we lose in weight, but we make it perfectly symmetrical. And symmetry is what gives it sparkle.”

The massive yellow diamond, worn only by three women including Hepburn and Gaga, was a 287.42-carat raw stone, which, after cutting, became a priceless 128.54-carat gem with 82 facets. The founder bought the raw stone in 1878 for $18,000.

Tiffany’s “deep connection with China” is represented in a trio of diamond bracelets inspired by 12th-century Chinese silk scroll paintings.

Fastest growing market

Asia is the fastest growing market in luxury retail, said Bogliolo. “The population is younger, and there is a growing middle class. This is an important driver for luxury. It’s very dynamic because you have a lot of new malls. That is very different from more mature markets like the US or Europe.”

He also expressed optimism about the Philippine market, a country he had visited many times in his stints with other companies, including a European high-jewelry brand. Tiffany opened its first freestanding boutique at Greenbelt 4 in July; it also has small corner stores at Rustan’s.

“The beginning is very encouraging,” he said, noting how the Philippines has both serious jewelry collectors and a younger clientele, who want and can afford different things. “This is perfect because we have an assortment that is the widest compared to any other jeweler.”

Inclusivity

Tiffany is a rarity in the luxury jewelry landscape in that it underscores its inclusivity as a brand, versus the exclusivity offered by the more staid and traditional European jewelers.

“To be inclusive doesn’t mean to be cheap,” the CEO noted. A New Yorker could be wearing a $10 million blue diamond to go to the supermarket, he said. “That is the opposite of the occasion-based jewelry where you want to show off. It’s about formality, it’s about showing that you belong to a certain social or economic level. It’s a different approach which makes Tiffany much more modern. Nowadays, if you think about millennials, they are very, very discerning of what they buy.”

With all the attention retail gives millennials, Bogliolo had an advantage coming to Tiffany, owing to his last two postings, at Sephora and Diesel.

“It taught me to be closer to the younger generation, to understand the importance of trends and to have a different mindset from that of the traditional jeweler, as I was before,” he said.

“And the thing is, this is not a matter of trend. We are embracing the digital world instead of resisting it. Tiffany has always been a brand that embraced the internet. When all the luxury brands were saying, we will never sell online, at Tiffany we grew our e-commerce. It’s this pioneering spirit of Tiffany.”

It’s this New York spirit that has also emboldened the brand to push the envelope in terms of imagery. It was the “first brand to advertise gay couples with engagement rings,” Bogliolo noted.

Jewelry, he added, is a form of self-expression, not just for women but also for men. In October, Tiffany is rolling out its men’s jewelry, beyond cufflinks and tie bars.

“In editorials, you will find a lot of men wearing women’s designs. I think with our men’s line, it will be exactly the opposite. You will have a lot of women wanting to buy also, because they’re very unisex, and they’re very bold.”

“Vision & Virtuosity” runs until Nov. 10 at the Fosun Foundation Shanghai. Proceeds from ticket sales will benefit Fosun Foundation’s charity programs.