Jean-François Fichot: The Legacy
Jean-François Fichot (1948–2011) was a French designer whose gifts blossomed in Asia. He began wandering eastward in the late 1960s, as soon as he’d graduated from the École des Beaux Arts in Lyon, tracing the old trade routes of the Silk Road. He traveled close to the ground, exploring bazaars and back streets, soaking up the smoke of cooking fires and incense, inhaling the prayers of the lands he visited, and collecting the pocket-sized treasures he found—be they precious or merely mysterious. Jean-François was particularly sensitive to the ancient civilizations of the lands he traveled through, as if he could hear the old songs of Persia and Bactria in the landscape. Sometimes he settled for a while. He stayed for several years in Goa, and then moved on to Southeast Asia, to Malaysia and Thailand, and then in 1976 to the vast, rich mystery of Indonesia, where he discovered the island of Bali.
In 1978 he decided to make Bali his home. There he found a piece of land on the outskirts of Ubud—a village in the central highlands that was renowned for its painters, and especially for its hospitality to foreign artists—and proceeded to build a house and a studio. On the slopes of his land (accessible only by crossing a foot bridge over a steep river gorge) he slowly created a fabulous garden: Jean-François, the inveterate collector of treasure, was also a collector of plants. Over time his garden became a grand botanical park.
In this deep tropical tranquility, Jean-François gathered around him a small group of Balinese craftsmen and began designing and producing the sublime one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces for which he would soon become internationally renowned. He also made playfully luxurious objets d’art. As his business grew, he engaged the help of his niece Chloe Rappy as marketing director. As if to balance the impact of his success, Jean-François became a student of Buddhism, while his Balinese Hindu household enfolded him in the island’s own sumptuous ritual rhythms. He was a big handsome man who seemed to have hundreds of friends wherever he went in the world.
Jean-François Fichot’s design philosophy must be divined from his works: he did not pontificate about his art. At the most, if you pressed him about it, he would say, “It’s about love.” But there is a signature design coherence: an ingenious combining of elements—often organic or antique materials he collected on his travels—with 22k gold, sterling silver, and gemstones. His jewelry is always elegantly balanced, even as it conducts a primal, totemic power. He was intrigued by the concept among tribal peoples of jewelry as a talisman, at once representing and protecting the soul.
Jean-François Fichot’s ability to transform his extravagant sense of beauty into wearable art had reached a point of exquisite ripeness when he died suddenly in a car crash in Cuba in 2011. His design tradition lives on in the hands of his studio craftsmen and in the vision of Chloe Rappy, whom he had designated his creative heir just six months earlier. The beauty lives on in a galaxy of works in gold.