Simply Abu Dhabi XXVIII

8 7 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I Alessio, please tell us about yourself. Howdid you get involved in the jewellery business and when did you realise that you wanted to be a jewellery designer? When I was seven years old my parents divorced and I went to Greece on holiday. It was my first trip away from Italy and I was very excited. I visited an exhibition of the jewels of Philip II of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great. And I was so fascinated by that gold and by the manufacture of those precious jewels that it was impossible to pull me away from the exhibition. So, this was my first insight into jewellery. My second one was when, after I studied science in high-school, I enrolled at the Accademia di Costume e Moda in Rome (the Fashion Academy of Rome) where I joined the jewellery design course, which was very influential at the time. When I graduated, I won a scholarship at the Accademia and after that, by chance, a friend of my cousin’s – a trader of stones – asked me if I wanted to join him in Greece to sell jewellery collections to jewellery companies. And then, Mihaïl Vassiliadis, a Greek jewellery company, asked me to work for them. They “adopted” me, and I stayed in Greece for three years. My third bond with jewellery happened when I saw an exhibition about 18th century painters from Valtellina, famous for their artistic pendulum clocks, to whom I’m distantly related. I was so fascinated by their craftsmanship that my love for jewellery just kept growing. My love for jewellery was born when I was 19 years old and studying at the Accademia di Costume e Moda, but it really grew when I was in Greece where I discovered my true calling. You founded your own company, Alessio Boschi Jewels, in 2013. How long was the journey to this point? In 2010 I founded Lux2Lux with my best friend. We started to make jewellery ourselves, and, using the connections I had in Asia, selling it to Chinese customers. One of our main clients was Florentia, a Chinese brand of pearl jewellery, and another one was Queen of Jade in Beijing. For the latter I was designing and producing unique pieces of jade. Then in 2013 I decided to move to Thailand where I founded Alessio Boschi Jewels. I didn’t name the brand after myself because I’m a narcissist, but because I won many jewellery competitions, making my name recognisable, which meant the business could grow easily. Around a year later I founded another company, Tao, where I was joined by my former assistant at Florentia and, soon after, by my sister Valeria. What are the stylistic codes of the Alessio Boschi jewellery brand? The first thing is the colours. I love colours because they are the meaning of life. For me they are everything, with or without using stones. For instance, needles of rutile within quartz or bubbles inside tourmalines that look like flowers are fascinating and beautiful to me. I also really like colours because we use them as a representation of our emotions and feelings. Another important characteristic of my jewels