PARIS — Ask any designer what the key to bringing to life a seemingly impossible idea is, and more often than not they’ll tell you that it wasn’t down to their imagination but to its combination with a master of the craft they wanted to tap.

This path from craft and mastery to unbridled inventiveness is at the heart of “Virtuosity,” the latest high jewelry collection from Louis Vuitton revealed Monday in a show at Bellver Castle, a striking Gothic-style landmark on the island of Majorca, Spain.

“At Louis Vuitton, craftmanship is the cornerstone of all our métiers, with high jewelry serving as a perfect example,” said Pietro Beccari, chairman and chief executive officer of the French luxury house.

And letting creativity run unfettered has helped the brand’s high jewelry gain traction.

“Our clients are consistently drawn to the most exceptional sets within the collection,” the executive continued. “We also remain attentive to their desires to create bespoke pieces in our Place Vendôme atelier, thanks to our curated assortment of exceptional gemstones and our unique Monogram-cut diamonds.”

Clients will certainly have plenty of both, in this first chapter of 110 pieces articulated in two parts titled “The World of Mastery” and “The World of Creativity,” which made their debut on models sporting custom looks drawn from the collections of Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director of womenswear.

In the first part, Vuitton’s heritage was viewed through the lens of seven themes around knowledge, from acquisition to mastery. Meanwhile, the lexical field around the second part gravitated around effervescent feelings and light in the designs developed by Vuitton’s high jewelry studio under the direction of Francesca Amfitheatrof, who exited her role as artistic director of watches and jewelry in March.

Aesthetically, the 12 themes of “Virtuosity” displayed the bold, graphic and protective direction developed under her tenure before breaking into more abstract territory.

Another idea that carried over was an array of stones that were already collectible on their own merit long before they hit the French house’s workbenches.

Exhibit A: the black Australian opal with rare red fires that takes pride of place on the Savoir necklace.

When the 30.56-carat stone came into the hands of the house, it was already in the triangular shape and there was no question that this was how it would remain when set.

“You can cut an opal but you have to be a bit respectful and humble in the face of what nature gives us,” said Louis Vuitton’s global director of stones purchases department, an expert gemologist who cannot be named for safety reasons. “We aren’t going to sacrifice material that has crystallized for billions of years — opals are among the oldest with diamonds and [natural] zircons — for the sake of a design.”

The opal found its match in a design playing on triangles as a symbol of know-how but also the French brand’s initials and trunk elements, such as its metal corners, and the vibrant green of bead emeralds and a 28-carat Zambian emerald drop complementing its fiery flashes.

Another masterpiece took pride of place on the transformable “Apogée” necklace, the pinnacle of the mastery part of a collection that counted a handful of pieces in the eight-figure price range.

Composed of two parts that allow for three different wearing options, its design took trunk touches a step further. These included with rivets but also mobile half-circle elements nodding to handles.

The emerald, a pear step-cut stone hailing from Brazil and weighing over 30 carats, is no less than “a miracle” for the expert gemologist.

Though the country was known for its quality stones, it had been well over a decade since high jewelry-grade specimens were on the gem market and this particular one was “the first to be extracted from a very well-known mine that hadn’t been producing for over 10 years,” the Vuitton executive said.

Such a piece, which also had a 10-carat diamond in a Monogram Star cut, could have served as a striking conclusion. Here, it was a high point midway in the collection and will be worn by Ana de Armas in the brand’s upcoming high jewelry campaign.

Other pieces included rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds galore but also explored their more unusual hues, such as a fancy dark-gray blue emerald-cut diamond and bi-color Brazilian tourmalines in a green-to-blue or pink-orange gradients. Akoya pearls also joined the house glossary.

Meanwhile, the high jewelry studio brought out new iterations of its high-collar masterpiece necklaces, a format that allows plenty of room to marry house signatures with new ideas.

These included interpretation of the Vuitton Damier motif, its floral signifiers but also Cuban chains, a recent addition to its style repetoire.

Another new motif was the eye, meant to represent here an omniscient but benevolent entity that accompanies and perpetuates knowledge in an unaltered state.

Developed with a male customer front of mind and showcased on male models, the dozen pieces titled “Keeper” went from signet-style rings to a bold fully paved chain necklace peppered with trunk-inspired motifs and V-shaped accents, topped with an antique cushion cabochon sapphire from Sri Lanka weighing over 10 carats.

A clutch of eye-shaped brooches, including one with a striking yellowish-green chrysoberyl — the stone colloquially known as a cat’s eye — were also on offer.

Creativity brought a more abstract direction where outlines became bolder and more organic, for fresh interpretations of house codes.

Case in point: the rope that returned in XXL proportions for the Joy necklace. This time, its winding gold strands are interjected with gemstones the size of boiled sweets of varying sizes. The smallest just topped 10 carats while the largest weighed over 41 carats. (A smaller but no less impressive version was also on display.)

Further themes include Florescence, hinging on imposing four-strand necklaces — one starring indicolite tourmalines and the other rubellite ones — and Aura, which gives the Monogram flower a new interpretation supported by yellow gold and blush-hued tourmalines, including bi-color ones that had a subtle gradient which changed depending on the angle at which they were viewed.

“Instead of cutting the stone following an axis where the two colors will appear, we cut it along the other one, which mixes colors, an effect reinforced by the brilliant cut,” the gemologist pointed out.  

All this was build-up for “Eternal Sun,” the grand finale that encapsulated the stones-first approach at play in the collection.

Around 60 carats of yellow diamonds, including 27 vivid specimen from the Zimmi mines in Sierra Leone that has taken some seven years to assemble, the studio imagined a spiraling structure meant to multiply the effect of already glittering stones.

While the stones themselves, whose pedigree and particularities will be the subject of a monograph at the Gemological Institute of America, what shone brightest was the spiraling outline that stretched the metal until it became invisible under a line of apparently free-floating brilliant-cut stones.

They made the case for hands with the expertise to push refinement to its peak — and the experience to know when to put tools down.