Vram Minassian is having another moment.
On Tuesday, during Couture Week in Paris, the Los Angeles jewelry designer plans to present his first high jewelry collection outside the United States: more than 40 one-of-a-kind, gem-set creations drawn from his Moments, the five chapters in his continuing collection, titled Continuum.
It is to be displayed in the showroom of his cousin, the designer and interior architect Chahan Minassian, in the Seventh Arrondissement. “When I called Chahan to tell him about doing a show in Paris, his response was, ‘It’s about time,’” Mr. Minassian said.
For the designer, who spent some 25 years working behind the scenes in jewelry before establishing his brand in 2016, the Paris debut will be an important career milestone — marking the brand’s 10-year anniversary and the midpoint of what he plans to be a 10-part collection.
“I’m trying to tell 10 stories, which are my Moments,” Mr. Minassian said. “I choose the subject matter first, and then I ask myself: How can I make an abstract, wearable art object that speaks to that chapter?”
The idea came when he married for the first time at 50 and became a father. “Suddenly I realized I was going to have continuity,” he said. “So I called the concept behind my work Continuum.”
The piece that set his exploration in motion was the Echo ring ($12,800), a design that Mr. Minassian said came to him in a dream in 2015: an 18-karat yellow gold band with two open ends rising above the wearer’s knuckle (although it also can be worn as a two-finger ring, turned to the side so the top opening brackets a second finger).
“The image of the ring was so powerful in my mind that I had to get out of bed and sketch it,” he said. “That single idea later morphed into full collections.”
His Moment 1, called Big Bang, included what he described as very precise designs. Since then he has presented Moments 2 through 5, with designs reflecting organic objects, dinosaur bones and primitive elements.
The pieces to be displayed in Paris also reflect his stone-setting skills and signature ombré color gradients. He makes his own mix of 18-karat yellow gold alloy that reads, as he put it, “a little on the peachy side,” and also uses unplated 18-karat white gold in its natural gray tone.
The gems in his creations are taken from an inventory that he has been building since the late 1980s: “I source the stones from my own safes.” They are set in silver, allowing the stones to sit flush with the jewelry’s surface so there are no visible gaps.
“We do everything in-house,” Mr. Minassian said.
The high jewelry version of the Xapis ring, one of the pieces to be shown in Paris, has a 16.29 carat peach tourmaline encircled by a total of 22.25 carats of orange sapphires. And the Vyv earrings have pomegranate, purple and orange sapphires totaling 28.76 carats, shifting through a spectrum of deep reds and oranges. All pieces are in 18-karat yellow gold and blackened sterling silver (prices on application).
Paola Russo, co-founder of Just One Eye, a multibrand concept store in Los Angeles that has carried Vram jewelry for a decade, said, “Art collectors love Vram’s sculptural pieces. His work is both organic and cultural, with a mix of masculinity and femininity. It appeals to strong, working women. He’s a true artist.”
Mr. Minassian, 62, was born in Beirut, Lebanon, into a family of Armenian jewelers and watchmakers. He spent summers apprenticing in jewelry workshops and collecting fashion magazines, but not for the fashion. “I was looking for wrists, necks and hands, and sketching jewelry directly on the images,” he said.
The Lebanese civil war prompted him to leave in 1981. He moved first to Paris, then to Los Angeles in 1985 to study at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), which had a site in Santa Monica at the time. “I became a pretty skilled wax carver,” he said. “That’s how I made my living then.” (Sculpting a design by hand from a block of wax is a common practice, allowing makers to work directly with form and volume before creating the piece itself through the lost-wax casting process.)
For almost the next two decades, Mr. Minassian established himself as what the industry calls a “private-label” operation. “Designers would bring their idea to me and I would supply the design, the gemstones, everything,” he said.
The 2008 financial crisis disrupted that arrangement. “Many of my clients were impacted. When their boat was rocked, it rocked me,” he said.
But two years later he opened his jewelry showroom and workshop on South Robertson Boulevard, and there the Vram brand was established.
“I like Vram’s jewelry because it is a little like weaponry,” said Diane von Furstenberg, who collects his jewelry, during a phone interview from her home in New Milford, Conn. “His craftsmanship is of the highest quality. His pieces make a statement without showing off.”
For the next chapters of his Continuum, Mr. Minassian said he has been thinking about Moments based on belief, industry, technology and even outer space.
For the final chapter, he will decide between a Hollywood-style ending, “which would be Rebirth, or a French ending, which would be Disaster,” he said.
Either way, he added, “it will come back all the way around to Moment 1, and the Echo.”
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