“That emerald necklace caught everyone’s attention at first, but it was all almost unfathomable,” says Stellene Volandes, editor-in-chief of Town & Country. She noted the scarcity represented by ropes of the rarest natural pearls from the Arabian Sea; necklaces in the heavy, graceful rani haar style studded with diamonds; and headpieces known as maang tikka, made with deep green emeralds from the legendary Muzo mines.
“It would be very difficult to find comparables for the sheer size and horsepower” of the jewelry at Ambani’s prewedding party, said Nico Landrigan, the president of New York jewelry house Verdura. “Indians are a jewelry-obsessed culture in a category all its own. So you can only imagine what the actual wedding will bring.”
Before the wedding, scheduled for July 12 to 14 in Mumbai, there was another lavish preparatory party and opportunity to show off some big rocks – a cruise from the Tyrrhenian Sea in Palermo, Italy, to the Mediterranean in Cannes, France, on an ocean liner whose 2,400 staterooms for the Ambanis had been retrofitted into three-bedroom suites for 800 guests. “What the Ambanis are basically doing is displaying a kind of old Hollywood glamour,” said EKA’s Mr Kumar. “You don’t see that with any other current billionaire magnate in Europe or America, at least not in the public sphere.”
For Daniela Mascetti, the former chairwoman of Sotheby’s jewelry division in Europe and author of “Understanding Jewelry,” a bible of the trade, the group is better compared to the Ambanis, the robber barons of the industrial age. “You have to look back to Vanderbilt or Gould, who also wanted big doorstops,” Ms. Mascetti said from London. “Let’s say it in a nice way,” she added. “If you have new money and want to show wealth, go big.”
Yet it is not that simple at all. Certain Ambani jewelery was made using the whopper stones, but that does not mean that the determining factor in its commissioning was size. “There is tremendous artistry in the work,” says Ms. Volandes of Town & Country.
Many of the Ambani jewels were designed by Viren Bhagat, one of the more refined high jewelers, but also an industrious private jeweler. Beyond the size of individual stones like the stepped emeralds, few, barring a detective like Mr. Kumar, could predict their origins.
