“Find out who designed this jewelry!” I have received all of your direct messages, texts, and emails and I am ready to respond. Who was the designer behind one of the most important jewelry moments of the year (decade?). Turns out, I know the man, and I should have known immediately. Few other people in the world could have designed the pieces in those viral images of the pre-wedding festivities of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant.
The man behind many of the pearls, emeralds, and diamonds in those pictures (matriarch Nita Ambani and her daughter Isha, the groom's sister, above) has been hailed as “the greatest jeweler of our time," and “jewelry’s quiet superstar." He has been called a “mysterious genius” more than once. His name is Viren Bhagat. You might not have heard it spoken before, you have not seen it on the red carpet or sold in stores, or in a newspaper advertisem*nt or even that much on Instagram (until now). It’s the way he wants it.
We met the man behind these emeralds.
I had the privilege of seeing Bhagat and even trying on some of his one-of-a-kind creations at the TEFAF fair in Maastricht last week. I wish I had pictures to show you, of the pearl tassel bracelet that hung so delicately across my wrist and down my hand, or of those antique spinel and diamond half moon earrings—but no photos allowed. Discretion is as valuable to Bhagat as the natural pearls, Golconda diamonds, Kashmir sapphires, and Burmese rubies in his handcrafted wonders.
He is a fourth generation jeweler with headquarters in Mumbai (his sons make it a fifth generation business). He designs only a few pieces a year. They are all made with the most exceptional stones in the world and are crafted with old world techniques but are at the same time modern in design, finish, and construction. I included Viren Bhagat in my book about the best contemporary jewelers in the world (published in 2016) and he told me then about the exacting standards and unwavering devotion to excellence that set his pieces apart: “We work only in platinum which is not traditional in Indian jewelry. I am very old school about this. There is a trend to use titanium and aluminum, which I respect, but if you see what Cartier was doing in the 1920s, it was platinum. It has both lightness and strength. Our pieces begin from one block of metal. A guy goes in and carves by hand.”
The bride, Radhika Merchant. Her wedding to Anant Ambani will take place in July.
He described what he considers most important in his work: “the truest gemstones of exceptional quality—cut especially for the design. And you don’t see any metal. There are no mountings visible. It’s as if the stones are just there, floating together.” If it all sounds like a jewelry dream, it is. Bhagat’s pieces are some of the most covetable in the world—when you can even find one.
Bhagat designed several of the pieces in those now-viral moments across Instagram and TikTok from the Ambani wedding party, and one assumes he will also be called on to create pieces for the actual wedding happening in July. He did not, in fact, reset the stones in that epic emerald necklace worn by the groom’s mother, Nita Mukesh Ambani, but his exquisite eye and his insistence on the highest possible quality is evident in other pieces. Note, please, the necklaces worn by Isha Ambani, her daughter. That pearl and diamond necklace (below) is a Bhagat work, and once you know that and understand what it means, you realize that those pearls are natural pearls, the rarest in the world—extinct, in fact.
Isha Ambani, the groom's sister, in Viren Bhagat jewels.
What exactly is a natural pearl? The natural pearl is, quite simply, the kind that occurs without any human interference in the water, and is formed organically within the mollusk. They are in contrast to cultured pearls, created by a process pioneered by Mikimoto in the early 1900s, where a foreign bead is inserted into the oyster, and the layers of pearl forms around that bead. For centuries the most prized natural pearls were discovered in the Persian Gulf by teams of divers who plunged into the waters searching for treasures. They became the jewel most sought after by royals and aristocrats and all those who wanted to adorn themselves with a gem symbolizing rarity, taste, and power. Then changes in the ecosystem all but destroyed the oyster population. Meanwhile, cultured pearls, also beautiful and not as costly, came on the market. But it’s the natural pearl that has remained the prize at auction.
Bhagat uses them exclusively. There is also the emerald drop necklace and earrings Isha wore to the festivities. Imagine the care Bhagat uses to select the rarest stones in the world, consider that each piece is crafted by hand, and then look again. And then think. This wasn’t even the actual wedding. Stay tuned.
Stellene Volandes
Editor In Chief
Editor-in-Chief Stellene Volandes is a jewelry expert, and the author of Jeweler: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Design (Rizzoli).
