James de Givenchy is the French-American founder of Taffin, the New York high-jewellery atelier he established in 1996. Born in 1963 and the nephew of the couturier Hubert de Givenchy, he trained at Christie's in the jewellery department and at Verdura before founding his own house. Taffin operates on an introduction-only basis from premises on East 64th Street in Manhattan and is widely considered, alongside JAR, Hemmerle and a small number of other contemporary ateliers, to occupy the very upper tier of the contemporary independent high-jewellery field.

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House style

The Taffin signature combines an unconventional palette — coloured ceramic, blackened titanium, oxidised silver, fancy-shape coloured stones in unusual settings — with a structural rigour that descends from the Verdura tradition. Recurring elements include large unfaced rough crystals set as cabochons, ceramic cocktail rings in saturated colour blocks, the use of carved wood and other organic substrates, and gem combinations that depart from the conventional diamond-emerald-ruby-sapphire vocabulary. The work is recognisable in trade and collector circles by the distinctive use of materials and by a set of recurring formal motifs (the cocktail-ring proportions, the close-set coloured-stone fields, the use of rivet and bolt detailing on more architectural pieces).

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Position

The house is small, with annual output running in the very low three figures of pieces, and operates on a commissioned-and-made-to-order model alongside a limited stock of finished pieces shown to clients on appointment. Givenchy is widely written about in the contemporary jewellery design press (Town & Country, Vogue, the Financial Times How To Spend It supplement) and his work appears periodically at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips contemporary jewellery sales. Within the small group of contemporary independent jewellers commanding genuine collector following, Taffin sits in the second tier alongside the other named ateliers below JAR and Hemmerle, with the gap between that tier and the broader high-jewellery field generally regarded by collectors as significant.