Our creative journey at RIOT takes a sparkling turn with Tiffany & Co., an iconic luxury jewelry brand that has been synonymous with elegance and innovation for over 180 years.
14 projects by RIOT, creative agency partner to Tiffany & Co.
Since 2020 our creative agency has made films for Tiffany & Co.: the first holiday windows the house ever told in film, a pendant that was lost for eighty years, a designer's voice that never existed on tape, and a staged archive built for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. Eleven projects, one thread. Tiffany's craft, filmed with ours.
It began with history. RIOT scripted and produced a ten-minute film on the complete story of Tiffany & Co., from a stationery and fancy goods store on Broadway in 1837 to the Blue Book, the Tiffany Setting and the flagship at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. The film became part of how Tiffany welcomes new people into the company, which is why it cannot be shown here. One discovery from the research still travels well: the Great Seal of the United States, printed on every dollar bill, was designed by Tiffany.
"When you think about beauty and elegance, we said, let's approach Tiffany." That is Guillermo del Toro on why the house is inside his Frankenstein: not as ornament but as living history, two centuries of craft made visible on screen. Heritage pieces glimmer, Elizabeth's cross becomes a pulse, and the Wade family necklace surfaces like a relic from another dream. There was more security on set for the Tiffany pieces than for any of the stars.
Long before the cameras rolled, RIOT was inside Tiffany's history with its archivists, working out how the past could breathe again. The archives are not a museum, they are a pulse, so together we built one: a staged Tiffany Archives inside the company's headquarters, designed, lit and styled so every gemstone and every sketch would sing on camera. Costume designer Kate Hawley walked into it like an archaeologist of beauty, with Louis Comfort Tiffany's glass, Meta Overbeck's drawings and scarab necklaces glowing under our light. Those scenes became the heart of Tiffany × Frankenstein, our contribution to the visual soul of the film, made with Tiffany & Co. and Netflix.
See Where Light Meets Rebellion →
For the Tiffany & Co. flagship in Chengdu, the windows began with symbols drawn from the city itself: birds, bamboo, a butterfly. "We took inspiration from symbols that were important locally to the Chengdu culture," says Christopher Young, Tiffany's Vice President and Creative Director. Our role was not to direct that atmosphere but to capture it: how sketches become sculptures, how Gloria Kim shapes a dimensional design by hand, how Tiffany glass refracts studio light.
"It's not just done by one person," Gloria says in the film. "It takes a whole team to create something and bring this beauty." Shot on location, it honors the ideas, the risks and the people behind the windows as much as the windows themselves. Young puts it plainly: "I don't want to keep it in a safe space. I want to push the boundaries. That's where I like to be." Same here.
Louis Comfort Tiffany made the Medusa around 1904 for his first collection of jewelry, one of 27 pieces and the only one he ever gave a title, signed on the back Louis C. Tiffany, Artist. It passed to the Baltimore collector Henry Walters, was sold from his widow's estate in 1943, and vanished. For decades the Met's curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen ended her Tiffany lectures with the same color plate and asked the room for help. In 2021 it surfaced at Sotheby's and sold to Tiffany & Co. for a record 3.65 million dollars, and went home to the Tiffany Archives.
Before anyone cleaned it, the Medusa came to RIOT for two days in May 2022. The brief was to record it exactly as it had survived: the dust, the tired settings, an old inventory sticker still on the back. We shot it on four digital cameras, on 16mm and on a Hasselblad, with the room almost dark, a probe lens travelling over the gold like a drone over a landscape, then single strips of light across the central opal, which shifts from pastel to fire as the light moves. In April 2023 the Medusa went on show at Tiffany's reopened Landmark on Fifth Avenue, and that November its story filled a sold-out talk at the 92nd Street Y during New York City Jewelry Week, with Marion Fasel, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Christopher Young of the Tiffany Archives. The vertical teaser films that filled the room were cut from this footage.
See The Voice of Schlumberger →
Jean Schlumberger transformed Tiffany's jewelry with his imaginative, vivid pieces, and left one gap in his legacy: a private man, he never gave a public interview, and no recording of his voice exists. With the Tiffany Archives, RIOT set out to recreate it for an installation at The Landmark, Tiffany's renovated Fifth Avenue flagship, working from his background, his upbringing and everything written about him to find the tone of a man who spoke sparingly and thought in jewels.
The voice lives inside a soundscape in three zones, carried by speakers placed so his phrases seem to arrive from his own consciousness as visitors move through the floor. Heritage, sound and atmosphere, honoring one of the house's most imaginative creative forces.
See the Holiday 2020 window films →
In 2020 Tiffany visualized its holiday windows in film for the first time, and RIOT made the three films: Tree, Display Snow and Ornaments. Each has a personality specific to its window. We play with the ornaments, explore macro textures and different glass for unexpected perspectives, and every film ends on Fifth Avenue in the snow, the magic of the holidays in New York. The Keys collection lives in these.
For 2022, a sizzle reel made for Tiffany's own creative team, to build a buzz across every department before the season: campaign films, window displays, planned pop-ups. It also carries the Tiffany & Co. x Andy Warhol Collection, built on the holiday cards Warhol drew for Tiffany between 1957 and 1962. We scanned his sketchbook drawings at high resolution, cut out the birds, trees and ornaments and set them moving across the footage. The snowfall is one sketched snowflake and a particle generator.
See the 2023 Holiday Windows film →
"Light through diamonds is such an abstract idea, but is truly at the center of everything we do," says Christopher Young of the 2023 windows. "Everything comes from sketches. We build models. We construct things with our hands." RIOT's job was the craftsmanship: the workshop scenes at Spaeth Designs in Queens where sketches became the real thing, shot on RED Raptor and Komodo with photographer Adrian Nina alongside, so the people walking past the windows on Fifth Avenue could see the hands that made them.
Four Valentine's windows for 2021, inspired by the charm of eighties arcades, brought to life in one film co-directed with Nastassja Simone. Scene-setting VFX, a synthwave soundtrack, a rich color palette and foley, shot over two days in December 2020 on vintage Canon K35 lenses and cut with eighties techniques, CRT converters and deliberate double LUTing. It ends as an arcade game, a second player joining, outside our Tiffany World version of the Fifth Avenue flagship. RIOT directed, creative directed, edited, graded, titled, designed and supervised the music.
We are a small creative agency in a building on 37th Street, and for six years we have been trusted to film one of the most famous houses in the world up close. We have never once taken that lightly. Some of our favorite days at RIOT happened inside Tiffany: a pendant nobody had seen in eighty years sitting in front of our lens, cobwebs and all. A voice that never existed on tape, playing in a room on Fifth Avenue. Our films in the windows on the busiest corner in New York, with the snow coming down on cue. We are proud of every one of these, the way you are proud of the kids who turned out better than you dared hope. And we are nowhere near done.
What the Tiffany & Co. team wrote to us the moment they first saw the work, straight from the inbox.
“This is as perfect and magical as I wished it would feel.”
Christopher YoungVP, Creative Director, Global Creative Visual Merchandising, Tiffany & Co.“Our CEO reviewed it this morning and he is very happy with the edit!”
Patti DayVP, Marketing & Creative Operations, Tiffany & Co.“Wow! The video is incredible! My jaw is on the floor.”
Moira Gallagher FergusonAssistant Curator, Archives, Tiffany & Co.You're in good company.
Making something for a luxury brand? A few lines is enough to start. We read every brief the same day, then set up a call or a meeting to talk it through, and tailor a plan and a bid from there.
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