French luxury group Kering, which owns the Boucheron, Pomellato, and Qeelin jewelry brands, announced the winners of its first-ever Generation Award for jewelry on Saturday at JCK Las Vegas.
Kering partnered with CIBJO (World Jewellery Confederation) and Politecnico di Milano, the largest technical university in Italy, on a competition in which university students and startup companies had to create jewelry—either a single piece or an entire collection—from discarded materials, thus reimagining waste as a resource.
Themed “Second Chance, First Choice,” the contest drew applicants from around the world, including from 10 universities and academies. Two students and two startups were selected as finalists.
Lee Min Seo
The winner in the university category was Lee Min Seo, a student in Korea, for her collection of jewels using discarded leather from traditional Korean percussion instruments known as jang-gu. In the startup category, Chinese brand Ianyan won for making jewelry with broken opals and imperfect gems.
The day before the awards presentation, Marie-Claire Daveu, Kering’s chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer, sat down with JCK in Las Vegas to explain the criteria for the Generation Award, which Kering had introduced for fashion and textiles in 2018.
Entrants “have to demonstrate the fact that they’re able to reduce the environmental footprint with what they are proposing—that’s the first thing,” Daveu said. “Second thing is that their collection has to be something that we can make at scale. On the economical side, it must be viable. And we look for creativity, because we are in luxury, and creativity is, of course, very important.”
Ianyan features fractured gems in its collections, as a way to promote the circular economy.
In addition to Daveu, the Generation Award x Jewelry jury included François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of Kering; Hélène Poulit-Duquesne, CEO of Boucheron; Sabina Belli, CEO of Pomellato; Christophe Artaux, CEO of Qeelin; Gaetano Cavalieri, president of CIBJO; Iris Van der Veken, executive director of Watch & Jewellery Initiative 2030; Bernadette Pinet-Cuoq, president of French jewelry trade group UFBJOP; Alba Cappellieri, head of jewelry and professor at Politecnico di Milano; Sarin Bachmann, senior vice president of the RX jewelry portfolio; and Elisa Niemtzow, vice president of BSR, a consulting firm focused on sustainability.
Ianyan founder Ian Yan
Daveu said the idea for the Generation Awards stemmed from the recognition that addressing Kering’s sustainability goals required bold and creative ideas.
“To be able to reach our targets on sustainability, above all, on the environmental side we must put at scale all the best practices, such as removing conventional agriculture and replacing it with regenerative agriculture,” Daveu told JCK. “But if you put at scale all these kinds of best practices, it won’t be enough to reach our target. That’s where we need innovations. But we need not only incremental innovations, we need disruptive innovations.”
Kering chose to reveal the winners of the Generation Award x Jewelry at JCK Las Vegas “because it’s one of the major affairs for jewelry, where you have so many people,” Daveu said. “And we wanted to use this awareness to raise awareness about the sustainability challenges in our industry.”
She highlighted the importance of traceability “not only for jewelry, but also for fashion, because if you want to implement the right criteria on the environmental side and on the social side, you need to know where your raw materials are coming from. But you have some sectors where it remains quite challenging, like the colored gemstone sector. That’s why I like being here. It’s the fact that we want to engage the entire ecosystem.”
Top: A piece of jewelry made from leather of the jang-gu (traditional Korean drum) by Lee Min Seo, who won Kering’s inaugural Generation Award x Jewelry in the university category