Verdura

There is a story the house tells about itself, from before a single piece of jewelry existed. In 1929, Duke Fulco di Verdura — Sicilian aristocrat, natural wit, friend to half of European society — is said to have spent the last of his inheritance on a costume ball at his Palermo palace, where Coco Chanel, Cole Porter, and three hundred of the most interesting people alive danced until morning. It was beauty deployed without apology, and it was pure Verdura.

That sensibility carried into the work. Fulco designed alongside Paul Flato before opening his own Fifth Avenue salon on September 1, 1939 — the morning Germany invaded Poland — backed by Cole Porter and Vincent Astor. He became the jeweler the best-dressed women in America wanted: Garbo, Dietrich, Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland. His work drew on Byzantine mosaics, Mediterranean shells, and Sicilian imagery in 18-karat gold, with a boldness entirely his own — the Maltese Cross cuffs for Chanel in the early 1930s, the seashell motifs, the curb-link bracelet Garbo loved above all. Princess Diana wore his crescent motif, photographed at Christie’s during the 1997 sale of her gowns. The house’s history includes a collaboration with Salvador Dalí.

When the house was acquired in 1985, its new custodians inherited not just the name but an archive of nearly ten thousand original sketches. Pieces are still made from those drawings, by many of the same craftspeople. What you see today is not a revival or a reinterpretation. It is a continuation.

Cayen Collection carries Verdura because we believe in exactly this kind of permanence. The Maltese Cross cuffs Fulco designed for Chanel are as vital now as anything made this season — the rarest thing in jewelry, a point of view strong enough to be timeless.