With Ice Cube, Chopard offers a contemporary vision of jewellery through pure lines and minimalist, almost architectural shapes drawing on the aesthetic perfection of the cube to sculpt the silhouette. Bringing a sparkle to everyday life, this gender-blending talisman jewellery can be taken anywhere and is lit up by the slightest sunbeam. It also embodies Chopard’s perpetual quest for responsible luxury, as ethical gold shines on these models through the work of specialised artisans who enhance every surface of the material. The collection now welcomes original ring, earring and pendant variations in all three gold colours: jewels to collect like tiny treasures!
With Ice Cube, Chopard invented a jewellery design based on the volumes of the cube. By aligning small ice cubes with reinvented facets, the Manufacture thus successfully appropriated a motif featuring perfect geometry and graphic lines to create rings, bracelets, earrings and pendants that are as beautiful to look at as they are pleasant to wear.
Minimalist aesthetics
Ice Cube offers jewellery that is pared-down, easy to wear and match. With its interplay of parallel and perpendicular lines, the collection takes on an architectural dimension, as the jewellery moves beyond its ornamental status to become an integral part of the wearer’s look. Its square shapes endow it with an androgynous identity easily lending itself to feminine or masculine wear. That’s what Ice Cube is all about: precious objects playing on jewellery-making norms.
The collection’s design interprets the cube through a series of varied alignments. Until now, the rings in the collection consisted of bands formed by a succession of small gold cubes, sometimes polished and sometimes paved with diamonds. Worn solo or stacked, they shone on every finger of the hand. Rows of cubes are now lined up on the same finger, with several bands either joined or spaced apart and linked by a crossbar of cubes that preserve the jewellery’s light feel.
The same process guides the shape of a pendant available in two sizes: while the smaller model is adorned with a central line of diamonds between the two rows of cubes, the larger one leaves room for a polished gadroon and sparkles just as smoothly and brightly on both men’s and women’s necks. The collection also welcomes earrings bringing an infinitely glamorous touch in three sizes ranging from large hoops to small clips.
Jewellery expertise
Beneath the collection’s apparent minimalism lies a wealth of carefully cultivated jewellery-making expertise. After almost ten years of research and development, Chopard has succeeded in perfecting the tools capable of tracing the grooves between the cubes using a diamond-tipped graver. Thanks to the intervention of a specialised artisan, the jewellery is then given chamfered corners resulting in lines that are clean-cut yet not sharp.
Ice Cube jewellery creations draw on their analogy with ice cubes through their unique way of reflecting light. Already featuring a peerless sparkle thanks to the sharp cut of the diamond, the surface of each timepiece is polished until artisans can see their own reflection: this perfectionist approach is known as ‘mirror polishing’. By dint of patient, meticulous care and using different tools – felt brushes, cotton wheels, polishing lathes and burnishers – the polishing artisan hones the surface of the gold to remove any roughness or residue, until the result is perfect. Exuding ultra-contemporary charm, this collection is a testament to the Maison’s attention to detail.
Dotted with diamonds hand-set in the Manufacture’s workshops, the collection’s cubes take on a frosted appearance. The brilliant facets of the polished gold cubes are complemented by those of the diamonds, embracing every ray of light and creating an infinite play on reflections – like tiny crystals gently caressed by sunbeams.
Ethical chic
A pioneer in responsible luxury, Chopard was among the first watchmakers and jewellers to commit to improving social and environmental practices for sourcing its raw materials. As early as 2017, as part of its Journey to Sustainable Luxury, it made Ice Cube its first fine jewellery collection exclusively crafted from ethical gold, paving the way for the use of ethical gold across all the Manufacture’s watch and jewellery creations from the following year onwards. One of the rare Maisons to have had its own precious metals smelting workshop for several decades, Chopard is able to control its value chain in order to offer creations that reflect a more sustainable approach to our stewardship of the Earth. The Ice Cube collection offers vivid proof that it is possible to combine ethics and aesthetics in meaningful jewellery.
