GemGenève, May 2025. Speaker: Gislain Aucremanne (Bulgari Heritage Curator Director)
With origins shrouded in mystery, the Tubogas technique represents one of the most fascinating transformations in twentieth-century jewellery. What started as a simple industrial form — a flexible metal tube initially designed for gas pipes — was elevated into a symbol of Italian style by Bulgari. The story of Tubogas, as shared by Gislain Aucremanne, Bulgari Heritage Curator and Director, at GemGenève in May 2025, is a tale of creativity, resilience, and the ongoing pursuit to make jewellery not just ornamental but alive with movement.
Aucremanne, a natural storyteller, delivered his talk before a captivated audience at GemGenève, the international salon that has become a meeting point for connoisseurs of rare gems, historians, collectors, and designers. His subject — Tubogas — is not merely a technique, but a chapter of twentieth-century design history. At once simple and complex, industrial and luxurious, Tubogas encapsulates Bulgari’s unique gift: transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, and elevating Italian style to an international stage.
The very word “Tubogas” derives from the French tube de gaz — a gas pipe. Developed in the nineteenth century to safely channel energy, the technique consisted of coiling narrow strips of metal around a central core, usually copper or wood, then removing the core to leave a hollow, flexible tube. Its strength lies in its structure: seamless, elastic, and solder-free, capable of bending and twisting with ease.
Jewellery, like architecture, has often drawn inspiration from industry. Chains, tank-track motifs, and even the linear geometries of skyscrapers made their way into Art Deco design. Yet Tubogas was different: not an ornamental borrowing of an industrial aesthetic, but the direct adoption of a mechanical technique into the world of goldsmithing.
Who first thought of transforming this utilitarian invention into a jewel remains a question lost in history. French jeweller, scholar and historian Henri Vever attributed early experiments to Auguste Lion in the late nineteenth century, though his nationalist pride in French innovation has left scholars cautious of his claims. What is certain is that the technique emerged against the backdrop of industrial modernity, when the world’s fairs of the 1860s and 1870s showcased marvels of engineering alongside objets d’art. Tubogas stood precisely at that intersection — an industrial form reimagined through craftsmanship.
For Bulgari, Tubogas would only become central decades later, in the 1940s. Platinum, the metal of choice for Art Deco refinement, had been requisitioned for the war effort, and precious gemstones could no longer circulate across borders. Jewellers were forced back to gold — yellow and rose in particular — and asked clients to bring in family heirlooms to be melted and reworked.
In this climate of scarcity, Tubogas offered both economy and innovation. Stripped of gems, it relied on the metal’s sculptural quality alone. The first Bulgari Tubogas jewels were bold gold coils — sometimes plain, sometimes framing a watch dial by Movado or Vacheron Constantin. At once modern and austere, they captured the mood of post-war Italy: resilient, inventive, and turning necessity into elegance.
The cultural context mattered as well. Women in 1940s and 1950s Italy, taking on new roles during and after the war, sought jewellery that was practical, wearable, and striking. Tubogas, supple and bold, answered that need. Its streamlined coils wrapped directly around the body, without clasps or fragile hinges, echoing both the modern woman’s dynamism and the Italian taste for yellow gold.
Flexibility became the essential word. As Aucremanne noted, the marvel of Tubogas lies not in what one sees, but in what one feels. To hold a true Tubogas jewel is to feel it spring and contract, to sense the suppleness of hundreds of hand-assembled strips. A fake, by contrast, is rigid, dead in the hand. Authenticity, here, is tactile.
From these experiments, another icon was born: Serpenti. Bulgari’s sinuous snake bracelets and watches of the late 1940s and 1950s were made possible only by Tubogas. Without its supple coils, a snake could not have wound itself so convincingly around the wrist, its head opening to reveal a secret dial. The two stories — Tubogas and Serpenti — are inseparable sisters. One supplied the body, the other the myth.
The Serpenti watches became symbols of seduction and glamour, famously worn by Elizabeth Taylor during the filming of Cleopatra in Rome in 1962. The supple coils of Tubogas made these jewels both comfortable and lifelike, turning a technical innovation into a cultural phenomenon. Through Serpenti, Tubogas transcended jewellery to become part of twentieth-century visual culture, appearing in magazines, films, and the wardrobes of icons.
In the decades that followed, Bulgari pushed Tubogas into ever more daring directions. The 1960s and 1970s saw a bold embrace of colour and contrast. Gold was worked in tricolore — yellow, rose, and white — to create rhythm and dynamism. Steel, a non-precious material drawn from the world of aeronautics, was painstakingly fused with gold, producing jewels of striking modernity. Burnished black steel heightened the drama, making yellow gold glow all the brighter.
The Tubogas became not just a bracelet or a necklace, but a canvas. Gemstones in cabochon cuts, Bulgari’s hallmark, were set against broad Tubogas bands. Antique intaglios and cameos were inserted, marrying classical themes with industrial forms. A carnelian intaglio of Jupiter and Mars was framed by golden coils, proving that antiquity and modernity could speak in the same language.
Enamel too found its place: bold domes of colour recalling Pop Art and Op Art, or the bubbles of Pierre Cardin’s futuristic architecture. These pieces captured the exuberance of the age, transforming Tubogas into an emblem of playful modern design, without ever losing its underlying technical discipline. The “bubble” necklaces of the 1970s, with their optical illusions and vibrant enamels, connected jewellery to the artistic currents of their time, bridging the Roman goldsmith’s bench with the avant-garde of global art.
Another of Bulgari’s passions — ancient coins — also found harmony with Tubogas. The Monete jewels of the 1960s and 1970s placed authentic Greek and Roman coins within flexible Tubogas mounts. Here again, the ordinary and the extraordinary collided: coins once exchanged in marketplaces now became the centrepieces of necklaces worn by the fashionable elite. History rested against the skin, framed by coils that echoed industry but spoke of Rome.
The symbolism was profound. Coins carried the portraits of emperors and empresses, evoking authority, continuity, and cultural memory. To wear them was to wear fragments of history. Combined with Tubogas, these jewels fused past and present: ancient Rome’s imperial power encircled by the modernity of industrial technique. For Bulgari, a family of Greek origin established in Rome, the combination was more than aesthetic — it was an affirmation of identity.
By the 1990s, Tubogas had become so deeply ingrained in Bulgari’s vocabulary that it naturally inspired new icons. The B.zero1 ring of 1999 — designed to celebrate the new millennium — incorporated a Tubogas coil within its circular form. Minimal, architectural, yet charged with heritage, it encapsulated Bulgari’s genius for turning technical solutions into design signatures.
The B.zero1 would go on to become one of Bulgari’s most successful designs, worn by millions across the globe. And yet, within its sleek contemporary profile, the echo of Tubogas remained — a reminder that innovation often draws strength from continuity.
Other variations followed: Tubogas set with butterflies in homage to Psyche, or reinterpreted in sleek contemporary bracelets and watches. Each reinvention testified to the technique’s vitality, its ability to absorb references from antiquity, modernism, and pop culture while remaining unmistakably itself.
To tell this story, Bulgari’s Heritage team, under Aucremanne’s guidance, has curated dedicated exhibitions in Rome and Milan, where visitors can handle, observe, and understand Tubogas. Seen behind glass, it may appear deceptively simple. Only in the hand does its genius become clear — the pulse of flexibility, the seamless strength of its structure, the hours of invisible labour compressed into a single supple line of gold.
In an age when luxury is often measured in carats and price tags, Bulgari’s exhibitions remind us that craftsmanship is equally precious. By placing Tubogas within a cultural narrative — from industrial pipes to Hollywood icons — the Maison asserts that jewellery is not only an adornment, but also history, memory, and design philosophy.
Perhaps, the greatest lesson of Tubogas is that beauty can be drawn from the most ordinary sources. Gas pipes, exhaust tubes, shower hoses — these humble references were not copied, but transformed. Industrial design became high design; utility became elegance.
“It is by the technique and by the design that you understand the beauty of Tubogas,” Aucremanne reminded his audience. In elevating the commonplace to the realm of luxury, Bulgari not only created a signature but also a metaphor for Italian creativity itself: a talent for reimagining the world, finding flexibility where others see rigidity, and turning necessity into art.
Gislain Aucremanne (Bulgari Heritage Curator Director)
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