About 25 years ago, the jewelry designer Sylvie Corbelin was at the Musée Guimet, France’s national museum of Asian arts, when she overheard a woman talking to a group of children.
“She was in front of a sculpture of Buddha with two Naga snakes and she said, ‘The snake is like a human: To grow, it has to lose something,’” Ms. Corbelin, who worked as an antique dealer at the time, said last month on a phone call from her home in Paris.
“This phrase stuck with me,” she added. “It gave me such an emotion that I came back home, read a few things about snakes and I started to design a snake.”
The serpent that Ms. Corbelin sketched that day was the first jewel she created under her own brand name. It not only inspired her logo, which features two snakes in an embrace, it also spawned a ring, called Initiée, or Initiated, “because according to many cosmologies, there’s always a snake at the origin of life,” she said.
The coiled snake has appeared in countless of Ms. Corbelin’s designs in the years since, including an 18-karat gold ring she recently created for the Year of the Snake, the Chinese zodiac designation for 2025. The $39,500 ring is set with an antique 72.5-carat pink tourmaline that was once used as a so-called Mandarin button, a decorative button traditionally worn atop the hats of high-ranking officials during China’s Qing dynasty (1644 to 1911).
Over the past century, snakes have figured prominently in jewelry, as their tails, long and linear or tight and coiled, lend themselves well to earrings, necklaces, bracelets and rings. But now, especially with the Lunar New Year connections, the motif has become particularly popular for gift giving.
Yet jewelers are hardly the only ones who have fallen prey to the snake’s powers of seduction. Designers around the world — in categories as diverse as watches, handbags, tableware, even cigars — have long revered the animal for its myriad aesthetic possibilities as well as its potent symbolism.
Jean-Christophe Babin, the chief executive of Bulgari, whose best-selling Serpenti collection of jewelry, watches and handbags traces its roots to a gold tubogas watch the house crafted in 1948, said the snake motif was so central to the brand that the two were virtually inseparable.
“Sometimes I think the motto should be ‘Bulgari is Serpenti and Serpenti is Bulgari,’ because it’s so strong across all the aspects of the company,” Mr. Babin said on a video call last month from the brand’s headquarters in Rome.
This month the brand showed that the line could shed its feminine skin and transform into something unequivocally masculine when it presented its first Serpenti watch for men, a collaborative piece designed by Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, Bulgari’s executive director of product creation, in partnership with Maximilian Büsser, the founder and creative director of the boutique watch brand MB&F.
The sleek model, featuring an ovoid-shaped case that resembles the head of a viper, is available in three versions: 18-karat rose gold with green accents, titanium with blue accents, and black P.V.D.-coated stainless steel with red accents. Each is a 33-piece limited edition.
It joins a den of snake-themed timepieces that have hit the market over the past two months in anticipation of the Lunar New Year, including Oris’s $9,100 ProPilot X Year of the Snake Limited Edition and Hublot’s $35,100 Spirit of Big Bang Year of the Snake, which features a three-dimensional golden snake slithering beneath the dial as well as a snake-patterned ceramic bezel. Both are limited editions of 88 pieces (the number appears often in connection with Lunar New Year products as eight is considered lucky in China and double-eight is even better).
The snake-related gift possibilities aren’t restricted to personal adornment. At the furniture and home décor retailer Crate & Barrel, a nine-piece collection of Lunar New Year items includes a festive red salad stoneware plate adorned with a coiled snake ($6.95) and a matte-black five-quart enameled cast-iron pot featuring a snake-embossed lid ($369.95), which recently sold out.
“The collection is selling super quickly,” Alicia Waters, president of Crate & Barrel and Crate & Kids, said on a call last month from the company’s headquarters in Northbrook, Ill. “The snake is a common design motif — it’s stylish, with a little bit of edge.”
The same could be said of the new Year of the Snake Masterpiece Humidor from the premium cigar brand Davidoff, which has created cigars and accessories celebrating the Chinese zodiac since 2012.
Crafted from Macassar wood, the cover of the humidor depicts a striking scene in marquetry: a giant multicolor serpent spiraling through ocean waves, as it guards tobacco leaves. Inside, 88 cigars exclusive to the box have been blended to, the brand said, reflect the snake’s attributes.
Edward Simon, the chief marketing officer of Oettinger Davidoff, which makes and markets cigar brands, including Davidoff’s, said, “People born in the Year of the Snake are characterized as being very fast thinking, witty, light on their feet, and that’s how we try to interpret and blend the cigar, by blending different tobaccos, like a master chef who envisions a taste he wants the consumer to have.”
The ornate snake-themed luxuries marketed by Western brands, however, stand in sharp contrast to the Year of the Snake gifts sought by many Chinese consumers, said Joey Yap, a feng shui and Chinese astrology consultant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
He singled out gift cards, mandarin oranges, tea sets, ginseng and, among wealthy consumers, jade and gold as auspicious gifts for the new year and cautioned that anyone giving luxuries with snake themes should be more concerned about what not to give.
“Clocks and sharp objects are usually not good things,” Mr. Yap said on a video call last month. “A clock is like, ‘Oh, your time is running out.’ Scissors and knives, normally, people don’t like to give because it’s like trying to cut ties. And shoes are a big no in our culture because the word sounds like ‘bad luck’ in Cantonese.”
The post Snakes on a Gift List appeared first on New York Times.
