Of all the jewelers in Paris, Walid Akkad may be the most successful one you’ve never heard of.
In three decades, he has rarely granted an interview about his work. His clients include entrepreneurs, Hollywood stars and socialites, but, in a world ruled by social media peacocks, he opts for the luxury of discretion. His Instagram account, opened in 2015, recently had just 32 posts, and less than half are images of jewels. Yet Mr. Akkad has more than 2,100 followers, many of them peers and industry insiders.
Failing some kind of six-degrees introduction, the easiest way to catch a glimpse of Mr. Akkad and his one-of-a-kind creations is to drop by Fine Arts Paris & La Biennale, the art and antiques fair also known as FAB Paris. The event, an amalgamation of La Biennale des Antiquaires, now defunct, and the more recent Fine Arts Paris shows — held its second edition at the Grand Palais Éphémère, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, this past November.
There, Mr. Akkad, 58, a lean, elegantly dressed and soft-spoken figure, lingered at the back of a minimalist slate-gray stand, preferring to let a display holding a pair of curved cuffs in Gabonese ebony, each mounted with a slightly off-center green tourmaline cabochon weighing more than 120 carats, speak for itself. In a side display, a baguette-cut Brazilian tourmaline weighing 22.10 carats was set into a ziggurat-shaped gold bangle that opened with a hidden clasp.
Mr. Akkad said he might glean inspiration from the cast of a shadow, the folds of a coat thrown over a chair in a restaurant or — for one voluminous gold bracelet — champagne bubbles, which he rendered in openwork orbs of various sizes.
A sautoir necklace made of delicate egg-shaped links was set with tiny diamonds: while identical, each link appeared different because they were aligned this way and that.
