Bathed in light: How FRED turns an Argentine childhood into high jewellery fantasy

Fred Samuel always insisted that his life in jewellery began not with diamonds, nor workshops, nor Paris - but with light. Not the delicate European kind, but the muscular, sun-kissed radiance of Argentina: the shimmer of water as he ducked beneath the surface; the silhouettes of hawkers on an enormous beach; the sudden, transformative blaze that made familiar streets look like mirages from another world.

Decades later, Maison FRED - “The Sunshine Jeweler” - has returned to that incandescent source. The house’s new high-jewellery collection, Monsieur Fred Ideal Light, created by Samuel’s granddaughter, Valérie Samuel, is a luminous act of remembering. It follows the earlier Monsieur Fred Inner Light line, which paid homage to the founder’s personality; this new chapter traces the radiance that ignited his creative energy in the first place.

“More than a travel diary, this collection is an invitation to escape,” Valérie Samuel says. And escape it does - into Buenos Aires reimagined as a dream city, part memory, part myth, stitched together with gemstones from across the globe: Australian opals, Tanzanian spinels, Colombian emeralds, Sri Lankan sapphires.

Across four suites, the Maison revisits the places that shaped Samuel’s vision: a street bursting with tango; a carnival square humming beneath its stones; a garden shimmering under tangled leaves; and the boundless horizon of Mar del Plata, where young Fred first learned to love the sea.

Nothing in Buenos Aires announces itself quite like La Boca. It is a neighbourhood that refuses to whisper: facades painted in unapologetic reds, oranges and pinks, the slap of tango shoes on pavement, the low-slung heat of summer.

FRED answers that blaze with Blazing Audacity, a suite of five jewels that practically vibrate with colour. At its centre coils a necklace built around a spectacular oval red spinel of more than 10 carats, surrounded by brilliant-cut diamonds and strands of red spinel pearls - each tied by hand, each falling with intuitive fluidity. As in La Boca, everything feels slightly improvised but somehow perfect.

Hidden inside this necklace is a detachable bracelet, fastened invisibly and set with a round mandarin spessartite garnet and two deep pink cushion-cut rubellites, each weighing over 3 carats. Earrings - mismatched by design - echo the spontaneity of tango dancers; the rings reinterpret the district’s colour-blocked façades with spessartites, spinels and diamonds arranged in graphic, joyful volumes.

If La Boca is colour, Montserrat is pulse. Its wide squares carry the ghost-rhythm of carnival all year, and during the festival itself the district becomes a swirling choreography of geometric fabrics, talismanic bracelets and crowds keen to stay in the street until dawn.

The Exalting Joy set channels that exuberance through a kind of jewelled embroidery. FRED introduces “Opalazur” - its pairing of white Australian opal (chosen for its elusive, iridescent reflections) with the gentle blue of turquoise, all set in white gold and edged with brilliant-cut diamonds. The result is a pattern that looks almost textile: fluid yet precise, opulent yet immediately human.

The long tie necklace, anchored by a 16.96-carat Australian opal, moves like a carnival ribbon and can be untied to form a bracelet. A companion choker splits into two independent necklaces, one carrying its original opal, the other accommodating a removable trapeze-cut royal indicolite tourmaline. Even the ear cuff deconstructs into three separate earring combinations. It is jewellery designed not only to dazzle but to be played with - like fabric, like costume, like celebration itself.

In Palermo’s botanical garden, sunlight behaves differently. It ricochets off glass, flickers across sculptures, filters through leaves that sway in unhurried arcs. For Fred Samuel, this setting - part Argentine wildness and part European order -captured a rare harmony. For the Maison, it becomes Bright Vitality, a suite anchored by seven exceptional emeralds sourced from Colombia’s storied Muzo mine.

These emeralds ranging from 3 to over 5 carats sit between fronds of diamonds shaped into fluid botanical lines. Baguette-cut and brilliant-cut stones form crisp contrasts, like sunlight slicing through palm leaves. Necklaces unfurl like branches; earrings swing with the motion of foliage; a cocktail ring stretches across the finger like a palm fan. The jewellery feels alive, kinetic, almost wind-powered.

And then there is the sea - Mar del Plata, the place where Samuel’s family holidayed, where he learned to swim like someone returning to his natural habitat. “I should have been born a fish,” he once said. It was there, rising from the water, that he first glimpsed what he called his ideal light: a white brilliance bursting from the shadows of beach vendors.

The Endless Horizon set transforms that memory into nautical sculpture. FRED’s iconic cable motif is rendered as a long, soft lasso necklace: one side a braided rope of white gold, the other a line of articulated lapis lazuli and diamonds. At its centre sits a mobile double ring, pavé-set with diamonds and holding a 10.10-carat pear-cut Ceylon sapphire - a removable element that can be worn alone or used to separate the necklace into two short pieces.

The companion cocktail ring wraps lapis lazuli and rock crystal (cut using traditional glyptic techniques) around a 4.10-carat cushion-cut Royal Blue sapphire, evoking sunlight flashing on water. Another ring features the Maison’s distinctive FRED Hero Cut diamond, here a 2.69-carat stone set against sapphire and diamond “cables”. It is the collection’s north star: a reminder of courage, adventure and forward motion.

If the four suites feel like chapters in an unusually vivid autobiography, it is because they are. Fred Samuel’s memories - sweet like dulce de leche, as he wrote in his memoir - bleed through every design. Yet Valérie Samuel’s interpretation prevents nostalgia from becoming sepia-toned. This is memory as prism, not museum: radiant, saturated, and alive.

Monsieur Fred Ideal Light is not simply about jewellery; it is about the elemental forces that formed a jeweller. Light. Water. Colour. Imagination.