It was a moment of Francesca Amfitheatrof unfiltered. Louis Vuitton’s artistic director for watches and jewelry made an appearance on the maison’s immersive exhibit, “200 Trunks, 200 Visionaries,” in Recent York on Thursday afternoon to debate her life’s work and her reinvigoration of Vuitton’s high jewelry collections.

Held in what was formerly Barneys Recent York’s beauty department — where aesthetic plywood and graphic posters cleverly covered up what were perfume display shelves — Amfitheatrof said that her work centers on freedom and storytelling.

“[High jewelry] is a really unusual world. It’s a world where time and money don’t really matter. It’s a unprecedented world since it’s totally unrealistic. It’s separated from every thing else,” she told an audience of friends, fans and what gave the look of the whole thing of FIT’s jewelry design department.

Above all, Amfitheatrof stressed the importance of space; Space from the pressures of business success, space from an excessive amount of derivative influence and space from executive micromanagement.

“How I approach production is — I mainly have an idea or an idea and I get obsessive about it. I divide it into chapters like a book, and I literally have a theme for each single chapter and go wild on that theme,” the designer said.

“I at all times just give [the brand executives] a sentence [relating to that theme] after which I literally don’t see, speak or show anyone in the chief teams anything until the gathering is finished. So it’s total freedom and no pressure. It’s nobody saying, ‘Oh you must design to this price point, or you must make the sort of necklace to be worn by this person.’”

Amfitheatrof also cautioned against looking an excessive amount of into the past. “We’re living in an era of the archive. And what I mean by that’s, especially in jewelry and fashion today, we’re looking into the past way an excessive amount of. Everyone seems to be obsessive about the archive since it’s so driven by marketing. And truly, I feel it’s killing creativity,” she said.

That is less of a problem at Vuitton, where leather goods and luxury travel accessories comprise many of the company’s archive.

“After all we’ve an archive, however it’s very much luggage and transport,” she said. “It’s so great because you’ll be able to take the spirit of the home and also you don’t should be derivative — that’s freedom.”

Amfitheatrof said a healthy distance from the archives is one in all her defining legacies from Tiffany & Co., where she spent 4 years because the jeweler’s design director.

Amfitheatrof’s most successful designs for Tiffany include the “T” collection, which she said grossed greater than $1 billion in seven years, and Hardware, which she described as “one in all the explanations LVMH bought Tiffany, since it keeps the brand going.”

Amfitheatrof said she was courted to turn into Tiffany’s lead designer for greater than a 12 months and that then-chief executive officer Michael Kowalski rushed her “T” collection into production, so it could hit stores a rapid-fire nine months later.

In 2017, Amfitheatrof departed Tiffany in a creative management shake-up that led to the ascent of Reed Krakoff, who had until then been focused on home product and leather goods designs for the jeweler. “I left Tiffany in a very horrible approach to be honest and it’s very unpleasant. It’s very hurtful,” she said of the experience.

Shortly thereafter, Amfitheatrof said she received a call from Vuitton CEO Michael Burke and her work with Louis Vuitton took off inside weeks. She has been tasked with elevating the maison’s high jewelry collections and has directed the engineering of a diamond cut to duplicate shapes from LV’s famous monogram, like a star or clover.

But Amfitheatrof hopes to maintain it there, aiming to steer clear of more literal interpretations of the home’s famous trademarks. “I attempt to steer clear of the ‘LV,’” she said.

Now, Amfitheatrof is looking forward and is starting to take charge of the photography, model casting and visual representation of her designs. “I even have to distill the essence and spirit of the home without making it feel prefer it is just repeating something since it sells,” she said.