Last September, I had the chance to be interviewed by the beautiful magazine Blumenhaus. It was the first time I took the time to speak so openly about my inspirations, my creative journey, and the evolution of Fontennoy since its birth in 2021.

The desire to explore and share.

This year, I wanted to extend this introspection by writing a monthly piece that you will find in the newsletter and on the Fontennoy website. These pieces will be an opportunity for me to share with you the artisanal, creative, and imaginary processes that accompany me daily.

For this first piece, I wanted to return to the heart of the brand: the desire to tell stories and bring my imagination to life through jewelry creation.

Inspiration notebooks.

Since my teenage years, I have kept notebooks that have accompanied me over the years. I record my inspirations, my memories, and, above all, my drawings in them. They are not diaries in the literal sense, but rather patchworks of little nothings that form a creative map of my inner world. They are like living archives, witnesses to everything I have loved and my way of seeing the world.

No matter what age I am when I draw or write, these notebooks continue to be nourished by my love for imagination, cradled by the stories, legends, and tales of my childhood. While imagination and maturity are often seen as opposites, it is as an adult that I realize how precious imagination is as a creative prism, allowing us to tell differently what inhabits our reality.

We are often reminded that fairy tales and fables are primarily about initiatory rites and serve to transmit social or moral lessons. But beyond this academic dimension, imagination reveals something else.

Imagination and sensitivity.

In Fairy Tale and Latent Myth, Nicole Belmont explains that myths, tales, and legends are works so ancient that their original meaning has long been lost. What remains today is more a matter of instinct and emotion: a kind of archaeology of feeling, where our sensitivity captures the very essence of these stories.

It is a theory that resonates deeply with me and is inspired by what Jacob Grimm wrote:
"Common to all tales are the remnants of a belief dating back to the earliest times, expressing figuratively its way of interpreting supra-sensible things. This mythical element resembles the small fragments of a shattered gemstone scattered on the ground covered with grass and flowers, which only a sharper gaze can discover. Their meaning has long been lost, but it is still felt; it is what gives the tale its substance and at the same time satisfies our natural attraction to the marvelous."

Creating: an exercise in universal sharing.

I, too, believe that imagination is rooted in sensitivity and weaves a whole system of images and symbols that evolve with our perceptions of reality. What makes it timeless is that it is both intimate and universal: it depends on our personal sensitivity, but it is also part of a long tradition of stories and legends told by the fireside, in a spirit of transmission and sharing.

In the world of fashion and artistic crafts, people often talk about creating emotion, whether to sell a product or to express a sincere approach.

When I founded Fontennoy in 2021, I wanted to give meaning to all the creative material I had accumulated over the years by passing on, in turn, the emotion I feel when imagining, shaping, and telling the story of a piece of jewelry.

I realize that this is also an opportunity to reveal a personal, imperfect yet sincere vision of my inner world. A process I share with other creators, convinced that it is essential to share our imaginations to make them fields of exploration and understanding of the Other.

Without speaking of rules or initiatory rites, imagination expresses deeply human experiences, which always find an echo within us despite our differences. Renaud Hétier sums up this thought better than I could by wondering whether
"Imagination, fairy tales, and legends might not be an opportunity for us to exercise our ability to remain children, or to become children again, and ultimately to aim for the ultimate power: that of resisting fatal time?"