ome to IsabelleFa, Eisingen, a small town at the heart of Germany’s jewellery-making region, sits off the beaten track but the chance to visit the workshops of one of the last surviving goldsmith-chainmakers in the world is worth the effort.

Family-owned and run, IsabelleFa has been crafting gold for three generations, since 1955. Its founder, goldsmith Emil Mössner, made jewellery for prestigious houses. In the company’s reception rooms, we were shown the hallmarks for each of these former clients, among them several familiar names: Wempe, Bucherer, Türler and Movado. Emil Mössner’s eldest son, Hans-Georg, trained under his father and at the Pforzheim jewellery school. This is where he met Isabelle Fagnoul, newly arrived from her native Belgium. What started out as a study trip became a lifelong commitment as the two goldsmiths fell in love and married.

Twisting the coils

Smoothing the Caresse bracelet

Forming the Digne necklace

A family affair

Hans-Georg and Isabelle share the same passion for craftsmanship and soon realised the potential of the traditional workshop in Eisingen, together with the possibilities for creating unique jewellery pieces with old tools and techniques. But instead of having others benefit from their precious expertise, they chose to set up their own company. The IsabelleFa brand — a contraction of Isabelle’s first name and maiden name — was registered on December 11th, 1987. The couple now work alongside their sons, Alexandre and Patrick, also a chainmaker, and daughters-in-law Claudia and Polina.

Isabelle Mössner

Hans-Georg Mössner

Jewellery by IsabelleFa is a closely guarded secret among connoisseurs who appreciate these statement pieces that whisper, rather than shout, luxury. A pair of red gold navette-shaped earrings, a chunky yellow gold bracelet or a rose gold necklace reminiscent of a Celtic torc speak volumes about a woman’s style. A case of “if you know, you know”. Such strikingly beautiful designs rarely go unnoticed. They resemble nothing else and this is what makes them unique.

Still, the reason we were in Eisingen on a snowy February day wasn’t to try on jewellery, however much we were longing to do so, but to learn the secrets of a disappearing art: chainmaker. Understanding the processes behind each piece means first looking at the history of chainmaking, before visiting the workshops where, in a demonstration of strength and subtlety, master goldsmiths transform tubes or sheets of gold into precious jewels.

Chainmaking is an ancestral craft that goes back thousands of years. Isabelle Mössner showed us an old goldsmith’s manual. In it, we learn that the first known chain was the “foxtail” which remained one of the main types of ornamental chain for more than three thousand years. Uncovered at the Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Iraq, it arrived in Crete where it was discovered among some of the earliest jewels of the Minoan era, in Mochlos and Tholos, dating from around 2000 BCE. As for the figure-of-eight shape, it appears in Bronze Age “cable” chains, also 2000 BCE.

The Grand Duke of Baden’s orphanage

Pforzheim became a centre for jewellery-making in Germany in 1767, for a reason that is indirectly linked to the rise of watchmaking in the canton of Geneva, as Isabelle Mössner explains: “Karl Friedrich von Baden-Durlach, Grand Duke of Baden, founded an orphanage and was determined the orphans should learn a trade. Watchmaking was fast developing in Geneva and Paris, and so the Grand Duke brought watchmakers from these two cities, including Jean-François Autran, Amadé Christin and Jean Viala, to teach their skills to those orphans who were old enough to work. From there, they learned other crafts relating to watchmaking, such as how to make watch cases, chains and enamelwork. On leaving the orphanage, they stayed in Pforzheim and set up business there.”

Digne “Cleopatra” necklace

“Around 1900 there were companies in Pforzheim that employed hundreds of jewellers,” Alexandre Mössner continues. “In fact the town is known as Goldstadt, the golden city. Now we’re having to fight to preserve the crafts of enamelling, guillochage and goldsmithing, and prevent them from falling into oblivion. Currently, we don’t know of any other company that works the way we do, with a collection such as ours that offers every type of chain there is. If all you want is to turn a profit, then you make chains industrially, on machines. Instead of safeguarding ancestral skills, the jewellery industry uses 3D printing, casting, stamping, electroforming and CNC machines. Techniques that leave no room for chainmakers.”

From melting to making

By now we were eager to tour the workshops, located at basement level. At IsabelleFa, the first stage is to melt the gold. The formulas for the various alloys are kept secret: too much of one or other “ingredient” and the gold will break up under stress. “We want our gold to be flexible so we can shape it, whereas watch bracelet manufacturers, for example, need a hard material. We mix 22k pure gold with pure silver, copper and palladium. Depending on the percentage of each, this gives us yellow gold, white gold, rose gold or red gold. We use only recycled metals,” says Alexandre Mössner.

The gold is an alloy of 22k pure gold, pure silver, copper and palladium

Stamping the hallmark

Every IsabelleFa gold chain starts out as a tube, which will be transformed by one of the five in-house goldsmiths. First, a steel rod is inserted in the tube which the master craftsman then mounts in a draw bench. Several tons of pressure are applied to the tube, which compresses and stretches the gold to make it thinner and denser. This is a gradual process as the rod must be replaced each time with rods of smaller and smaller diameters, as required. At regular intervals, the gold is heated to 600°C to soften it and prevent it from breaking. As the drawing process continues, the tube becomes longer and thinner. “We aim for the densest material possible, for a shiny, homogenous surface,” Patrick Mössner explains. The goldsmith can give the tube different shapes, including the tapered form that becomes a pair of Navette earrings or a Lyrique necklace.

Show of strength

Once the tube has the required diameter, a copper wire of the same diameter is threaded through it (the copper will be dissolved at the end of the process). Using sheer strength, the goldsmith then coils the tube around a steel mandrel. The gold now has the form of a solid spring. “A chain that hasn’t been coiled around a mandrel cannot be described as handcrafted,” Alexandre Mössner informs us. This gold spring is sawn lengthwise, transforming the coils into open rings which are linked together then fused to make a cable chain. Nor is this the end: the chainmaker still has to true each link, also by hand, to give the jewel its finished aspect. It takes strength as well as subtlety to straighten each link and create a bracelet or a necklace that will sit perfectly around the wrist or throat. One twist too far and there is no going back: the gold will have to be melted and the entire process started from scratch.

Lyrique chain and earrings

One piece in the showroom that particularly caught our eye was the Digne “Cleopatra” necklace, with its wide, torc-like design. When making it, the goldsmith physically bends a long strip of gold around a steel column to form a circle. He then transfers the piece to a bust, where it’s carefully hammered into shape. It takes 12 weeks to make just one of these stunning necklaces. “This is such a difficult piece that it’s actually the final project for students working towards their Master’s degree at the Pforzheim jewellery school,” remarks Patrick Mössner. Once finished, the necklace, like every other piece by IsabelleFa, goes through further stages, including polishing and fitting the almost invisible clasp, discreetly set with a diamond.

L’Elastique bracelet

During the tour, we noticed Patrick’s wife, Polina Mössner, playing with her gold bracelet. “Polina was forever taking out her hair tie and putting it on her wrist. We’d find them all over the house,” he says. “That gave me the idea for L’Elastique, a gold bracelet in the form of a scrunchie. By combining the coiling technique, the starting point for all our jewellery, with another, secret technique to give flexibility, I succeeded in creating an extensible bracelet. It would be impossible to achieve the same result using 3D printing or casting.”

Grace pavé bracelet

During our visit, it becomes clear that the essence of chainmaking lies with this ability to make gold links. Every piece of IsabelleFa jewellery begins with a link, large or small, to become a bracelet, a pair of earrings or the grand Cleopatra necklace. And behind this simple link are thousands of years of expertise.