Despite sky-high gold prices, turbulence in the diamond market and global political and economic uncertainty, the high jewelry presentations in Paris next week are the latest sign of a strong — one might even say glittering — jewelry market.
“There is an appetite for jewelry that stands out and focuses on rare stones as well as intriguing designs,” Donatella Zappieri, a jewelry business consultant specializing in strategic management and a lecturer at Bocconi University in Milan, said in an email. “That also has laid the foundations for a new era in one-of-a-kind jewelry.”
So even as luxury giants such as LMVH and Kering reported declines in first quarter global sales, there has been little sign of a drop-off in the $32.2 billion in jewelry sales that Bain and Company reported for 2024.
The attraction has not solely been for classic gems such as diamonds and emeralds, or precious metals like platinum. The presentations in Paris — and those shown recently in other alluring locations — have included lesser-known stones, unusual materials and inventive techniques. And certain designers’ creations flirted with art world notions of scale and purpose.
“From the standpoint of history, what’s striking is how intricate jewelry constructions have become,” said Mathieu Rousset-Perrier, the curator of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Jewelry collections at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
“It’s much like what we have been seeing on the runway at couture,” he added. “The question is: Where is the saturation point?”
And also, who will guide the houses forward from there?
Much like the fashion world — where Francesco Risso’s departure from Marni in mid-June means that 18 brands are now naming new designers this year — the jewelry departments at Chanel, Chaumet, Louis Vuitton and others are turning to new leadership that will have to adapt to economic challenges as well as a shift in consumer attitudes.
“We are seeing a change in the jewelry landscape because people are wearing less, but more intentionally,” Mr. Rousset-Perrier said, “so houses are going to have to think less in terms of production and more in terms of creativity.”
All of which could well make this season an inflection point in high jewelry.
The Grand Tour
Over the past few years, the high season for high jewelry has quietly expanded, with houses welcoming V.I.P. clients to destination presentations on a calendar that roughly begins with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala in early May, followed by the Cannes Film Festival, then the Couture in Paris and finally the Venice International Film Festival in late August (where Cartier has been the event’s official partner since 2021).
Bulgari chose the Met Gala to premier its Polychroma high jewelry collection on the likes of Zendaya and ASAP Rocky, followed in late May with a presentation in the Sicilian city of Taormina. (Things may change next year though, as the house recently announced an exclusive three-year partnership with the Venice Biennale.)
The collection’s 250 jewels included what Bulgari said was a record 60 “millionaire creations,” the label it uses for its most exclusive and costly pieces; five high-end watches; and one-of-a-kind jeweled handbags, an offering also seen recently at Hermès and Buccellati.
Among the standouts: Cosmic Vault, which Anne Hathaway wore on the gala’s blue carpet. The jewel was a supple construction of more than 200 elements, alternating diamonds and sapphires around a 123.35-carat blue sugarloaf sapphire from Sri Lanka, all accented with 13 diamond drops.
At Dior, Victoire de Castellane’s collection, called Diorexquis, was presented in early May at the Château de La Colle Noire in southern France, Christian Dior’s last and grandest estate.
The 163 jewels featured opals, diamonds, sapphires and rubies mounted in painterly combinations; embellished by techniques such as plique-à-jour (transparent) enameling; and combined with less precious materials such as mother-of-pearl, aventurine, turquoise, onyx and lacquer.
As Gucci reshapes its fashion business with the arrival of Demna as artistic director, the house collaborated for the first time with Pomellato, another brand in the Kering stable.
Named Monili — an old Italian word for jewels — the collection was inspired by Pomellato pieces from 1984 and featured leather with gold, pavé diamonds and colored gems. Some of the jewels and a clutch with a diamond pavé chain appeared on the catwalk in May during Gucci’s Cruise 2026 show in Florence, Italy.
Last month Louis Vuitton chose the Gothic-style Bellver Castle on Majorca, a onetime royal residence with a striking circular structure, as the backdrop for a collection called Virtuosity.
The largest presentation the brand has staged to date, it offered 110 jewels in 12 themes based on words such as monumental, motion and joy. It also was the house’s final collection by Francesca Amfitheatrof, who left in March after seven years as its artistic director of jewelry and watches.
Cartier’s latest collection is named En Équilibre, or Balancing Act, to evoke the house’s approach to color, form and harmony. The display next week at the Ritz Paris is expected to include about 30 creations fresh from the atelier (as usual, sometimes production delays turn into presentation no-shows.)
In May, some early releases were shown in Stockholm, including the Salento necklace in diamonds and an asymmetrical composition of sapphires. There also was Pavocelle, a necklace inspired by the eyespots on a peacock’s plumage and featuring a Ceylon sapphire cabochon center stone weighing more than 58 carats.
The sapphire, surrounded by diamonds, could be detached and worn as a brooch, while a pear-cut diamond attached to the clasp could be worn as a pendant.
In early June, Chanel traveled to Kyoto, Japan, to unveil the final high jewelry collection designed by Patrice Leguéreau, who died in November. He had directed the house’s Fine Jewelry Creation Studio for 15 years.
Mr. Leguéreau named the 109-jewel collection Reach for the Stars, as it incorporated familiar house codes such as stars, comets and lions. But the 67 jewels introduced at the Kyoto National Museum also highlighted a new motif: wings, inspired by Gabrielle Chanel’s comment in a 1938 article in French Vogue: “If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.”
One of its standout pieces was the transformable Wings of Chanel necklace, featuring diamond latticework on either side of a 19.55-carat cushion-cut pink-orange padparadscha sapphire, with a pendant element of pavé-set stars and halo-set brilliant-cut diamonds that could be detached and worn as a bracelet.
The collection also included a series of five wing-shape brooches, crafted in collaboration with the Japanese master lacquer artisan Yoshio Okada.
An Artistic Approach
Painterly or sculptural qualities make some of the new jewels worthy of display — and at least one expert said that is a trend more houses may soon follow.
“We’ve reached a point of saturation where certain houses will have to go back to a more design-led aesthetic in order to feel special and attract new customers,” said Maxim de Turckheim, a luxury brand strategist who is overseeing the renovation of the jewelry department at the Harvey Nichols store in London.
“It’s the same as with fashion,” he added. “When something has worked so well for so long, it’s easy not to evolve.
“But everything has changed in the last couple of years. People are consuming differently than before, and younger wealthy consumers are more clued up than ever about buying the things they know retain value. The brands that are choosing to show jewelry as art that could be shown permanently in the home is a very intelligent move. If you spend that kind of money, why wouldn’t you want to look at it every day?”
One designer whose work reflects the idea is Anna Hu, whose dove gray salon overlooking Place Vendôme is scheduled next week to display a handful of titanium jewels with gems set amid vivid hand-painted pigments.
Its premier jewel will be La Rose Gracieuse, a lifelike rose brooch measuring nearly six inches long. It includes a fancy yellow diamond center stone, petals set with 229 rubies, leaves featuring 70 emeralds and a stem of 37 brown diamonds. Inspired by the Bal de la Rose charity gala in Monaco, where Ms. Hu lives part-time, the brooch comes with a custom-made base for display.
Also next week, Piaget’s private salon on Place Vendôme is to display 51 jewels revealed to V.I.P. clients in June in Barcelona, Spain.
Called Shapes of Extraleganza (a favorite house term), the collection played on Piaget’s connections to the art world by, for example, interpreting Mondrian graphics in a pink gold, diamond, troilite and chrysoprase necklace anchored by a 10.9-carat octagonal-cut yellow sapphire. Also, a one-of-a-kind necklace inspired by the Memphis movement featured slices of ornamental stones typically used on watch dials, such as rhodonite and rhodochrosite, spliced with rows of diamonds, sapphires, ruby root and chrysoprase.
Beauty in Imperfection
At Boucheron, the creative director Claire Choisne will next week unveil Impermanence, a concise lineup of 28 jewels displayed in six compositions inspired by the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, a celebration of imperfection and impermanence.
“I wanted to explore and crystallize nature’s fleeting character, and the way light moves into shadow, while achieving a true-to-life aesthetic,” Ms. Choisne said. “We pushed a lot of things to the extreme, by whatever means possible.”
The collection, the brand said, required four years of development — an extension of the preservation research begun for its Eternal Flowers collection in 2018 — and more than 18,000 hours of craftsmanship. During the preview, Ms. Choisne described it as her “most technical and innovative yet.”
Pieces that resembled ultrarealistic flowers or insects were fabricated by a combination of traditional jewelry making techniques and technology, using a wide range of materials including ceramic and borosilicate, a glass used for laboratory test tubes. Ms. Choisne said she chose the glass because it can be worked down to two millimeters (about 0.08 of an inch) yet is still strong enough to be studded with diamonds.
Plant-based resin and ultra high resolution 3-D printing, which Ms. Choisne said had never before been used in high jewelry, were used to create two thistle heads, worked in white gold and coated in ceramic, with more than 600 bezel-set diamonds accenting their florets.
While they were displayed in a vase of composite material, one was made to be worn as a brooch and the other, a two-finger ring.
Several pieces had the qualities, if not the technical structure, of trembleur jewels, made to move with the wearer. For example, a wisteria jewel of titanium and aluminum covered in diamond pavé and with a white and black ceramic finish on petals and stems weighed just 150 grams (slightly more than five ounces). It could be worn as a headpiece or a brooch.
Each composition would come with a custom-made case and a display base, as well as smaller boxes for transporting individual pieces. “I have an obsession with jewels, that they shouldn’t go into a safe,” Ms. Choisne said. “I understand why they do, but it makes me sad.
“This way, if you’re not wearing them, you can look at them all the time.”
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