At Paris Fashion Week, Antwerp jewellery house Wouters & Hendrix celebrates its 40th birthday

Katrin Wouters and Karen Hendrix were jewellery designers to the Antwerp Six, emerging with the art-school collective when, in the spirit of a radical Flemish fashion bomb, they left Belgium in a rented truck and rolled up at London Fashion Week in 1986. The pair had honed their craft alongside Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and the others at Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Having started selling their Surrealist-tinged, handmade jewels in Antwerp two years before, they were simultaneously creating pieces with the designers around their collections.

This week, during Paris Fashion Week, Wouters & Hendrix (which still adheres to the RTW-schedule of two collections a year), launches its most high-brow project to date, in partnership with the recently revived Royal Museum of Fine Arts, or KMSKA, Antwerp. Part of the jewellery house’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the ‘Je est une autre’ collection is directly inspired by four paintings Karin Wouters and her team chose from the museum’s 19th-century saloon. The result is a collection that culminates in four 19th-century style parures (complete sets) of jewellery, also offered as separate RTW pieces. As is typical with Wouters & Hendrix designs, many of the rings, earrings and necklaces, created from sterling silver and gold-plated silver, are ingeniously modular and are carefully crafted to be dismantled and worn in numerous ways.

‘When the museum posed the idea of a collaboration their initial thought was that perhaps we might make a jewellery line for them,’ Karin tells me at the house atelier, a former liquor distillery in central Antwerp, ‘But for me it's impossible just to make only beautiful things. I need to have a story, something with depth, so we asked to choose four paintings that would make us think. Then we asked ourselves: “If these women lived today, who would they be? What jewels would we create for them?”’

For Carmen Willems, general director at KMSKA, any Wouters & Hendrix collaboration was a win-win. ‘Firstly, the fact of them being such strong craftsmen was a genuinely good fit. Then, the way in which they always bring a twist to what they do correlates with our new vision for the museum,’ she told me at the museum's party to celebrate the brand's 40th anniversary.

After a few sessions with the museum curators, the jewellery designers settled on a formidable quartet. ‘We approached our visits in an impulsive way, while listening to the museum curators' stories and insights,' Katrin reveals of the collaborative process. 'The four paintings we settled on intrigued me very much: the Parisian Sphinx is dreamy, mysterious, even, while a defiant Cleopatra is experimenting with poison in preparation for her death. The Countess Rattazzi appears daring, rebellious, just in the way she stands, and the painting of the woman with the babies? She drew us in just as we were walking by.’

As a result, the parures were created to fit the characters of each woman in the paintings, as Katrin and her team evisaged them. "The Parisian Sphinx" by Alfred Stevens inspired the aquamarine-themed ‘Parure de l’Entourage’. The salonnière "Countess Rattazzi" by Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran informed the ‘Parure de l’Incroyable’ in boldly elegant chain designs that ‘shimmer without the need for stones’. Alexandre Cabanel’s "Cleopatra", meanwhile, is the force behind ‘Parure de la Salamandre’, its salamanders reflecting the Egyptian queen’s ‘talent for shrewd reinvention’. The ‘Parure de La Peregrina’, a homage to the image of the ‘formidable, nameless mother in Virginie Breton’s "A l’eau!" is a particular favourite, a pearl-based collection that ‘celebrates the ocean as our birthplace and the extraordinariness of “ordinary life”.

Though, perhaps lesser known in the UK, the independent nature of Wouters & Hendrix's topsy-turvy collections of handmade costume- and fine-jewellery is wildly appealing to a new generation. Collaborations are, of course, in the brand’s DNA, and projects with Belgian photographer Mous Lamrabat and accessories and jewellery designer Stephanie D’heygere are just two notable Wouters & Hendrix creative get-togethers. The Antwerp house currently helms a string of standalone boutiques across Belgium and Amsterdam, with international outposts in Japan, China and North America.

Karen Hendrix left the business a couple of years ago but her maverick spirit is palpable in the atelier and through the collections. ‘Forty years ago, I could not have imagined our world could be like this,’ Katrin Wouters admits. 'We started, just the two of us, believing in our small company and what we were doing. And now we’ve arrived here. When I look back, I see that each jewellery story we create, though different and surprising, is a reaction to the collection before, in that, we take the knowledge and experience we get and always try something new with it’.

Wouters & Hendrix designs are available to buy at Wouters-hendrix.com and farfetch.com