The Pearl Gets a Surreal Makeover and Harry Lambert Is Behind It
Harry Lambert takes Pandora into a surreal dreamscape of baroque pearls, oversized frogs and whimsical mushrooms and the result is the most playful jewellery collection of the season.
Pandora has never been a brand that plays it safe, and Pandora Wonders, its new multi-year creative platform launching this summer, is proof that it has no intention of starting now.
The platform launches during Paris Haute Couture and High Jewellery Week on 9 July, a deliberately unexpected choice for a brand that has always occupied its own creative territory. The first chapter focuses on freshwater pearls, reinterpreted through the lens of contemporary culture and the imagination of one of Britain’s most distinctive creative minds: stylist and creative director Harry Lambert.
Lambert, best known for dressing cultural icons including Harry Styles, Emma Corrin and Alexander Skarsgård, has co-created a collection of 11 limited-edition dangle pearl charms that feel less like jewellery and more like objects discovered in a cabinet of wonders. A childhood-invoking ice cream cone. A subterranean squid. A whimsical mushroom. A webbed-footed frog ready to spring across the skin. A puffer fish blown up to XL proportions and worn dangling from the wrist. Each piece is crafted using one-of-a-kind baroque freshwater pearls, specifically chosen for their shape, and hand-set by Pandora’s expert artisans with 14K gold plated details.
No two baroque pearls are the same, which means no two charms are ever quite identical. A pearl might form the shell of a space rocket or the body of a mouse depending on what nature has provided. It is a genuinely charming idea, in every sense of the word.
The campaign, shot in London and inspired by Lambert’s childhood sense of awe at seemingly enormous objects, features models interacting with supersized versions of the charms, clutching golden pea pods, standing atop magical mushrooms and holding heart-shaped lockets. It is surreal, playful and completely on brand for a stylist whose work has always had a sense of humour about it.
“This collection is where nature meets unbridled imagination,” say Pandora Creative Directors Francesco Terzo and A. Filippo Ficarelli. “Each one feels discovered, not made, as if drawn from a cabinet of wonders where the ordinary has shifted into something extraordinary.”
Pandora Wonders is available in limited quantities at select Pandora stores and on Pandora.net from 8 July, and exclusively through Dover Street Market London from 7 July. For anyone in London between 17 and 19 July, Pandora is also taking over Malaysia Square at Battersea Power Station with a surreal pop-up where you can style and purchase the collection, and eat a pearlised ice cream in the Wonders dreamworld. Which is, frankly, reason enough to go. Shop
