The designers of the great jewellery houses transform the moment into an ageless wonder

Boucheron’s Journey from Darkness into Light 

“With this collection, I want to celebrate the beauty of nature before it fades,” says Boucheron’s creative director Claire Choisne. The collection, which she dedicated to impermanence and transience, was unveiled at the House’s private salons in the Hôtel de Nocé at Place Vendôme. The stage, in darkness, suddenly, lit up to reveal six gleaming floral arrangements... Gold, diamonds, high-tech materials oscillating between the non-colours black and white. “Six compositions,” she says, “that tell of impermanence, of light and shadow, and in this, reveal their preciousness.” 

The collection comprises 28 jewels, composed into four- or five-piece ikebana bouquets, designed to be worn in the Boucheron tradition of multiportés – as necklaces, brooches, bracelets, wrapped around the waist, or even tucked into the hair. Highlights – a glass tulip so crystalline it seems made of air, a titanium poppy coated in Vantablack, which absorbs 99.965 percent of light – the blackest black, as though the bloom dissolves into a pure nothingness in which trembling diamond stamens remain. 

Choisne’s Composition No. 4 may be the most balanced – bright, fresh as morning, accented with black lacquer and spinels. A cyclamen dusted with 700 rose-cut diamonds alongside an oat stalk, both seemingly stirred by a spring breeze. Adding to this, a movable caterpillar with fine bristles and a black-and-white butterfly – darkness and light, in harmony. Within it all, the grand design of becoming and passing away – what some call nature, others creation. 

This collection is both memento mori and carpe diem. Gorgeous objects forged from Earth’s oldest materials and the most innovative high-tech compounds. Or, as Choisne puts it, “An ode to the fragile moment I wanted to crystallise in these jewels for eternity.” boucheron.com

Bvlgari’s Dance of Colours

Last May, a truly extraordinary performance unfolded at the Greek Theatre of Taormina – Polychroma by Bvlgari. Six hundred of the most magnificent creations ever crafted in the Maison’s ateliers since Greek silversmith Sotirios Voulgaris moved to Rome in 1891 to found what would become the most Italian of all jewellery houses. Stars from around the globe – Priyanka Chopra, Viola Davis, Liu Yifei – gathered in Sicily to celebrate the new collection with Bvlgari’s prima donna, Lucia Silvestri. 

Necklaces woven from coloured gemstones, cut into cabochons in the tradition of Byzantine goldsmithing – baroquely exuberant, inspired by Mughal paintings, strung together as if ready to dance. Little wonder, then, that Sir Wayne McGregor of London’s Royal Ballet was entrusted with choreographing the presentation. And the colours danced... 

An antique spinel from Tajikistan in soft rose-red. A Sri Lankan sapphire, sugarloaf-cut, in a blue so deep you plunge into it as into a dream. Or the yellow diamond that Silvestri had cut into an Asscher, framed with diamonds to draw out its hue, like the sun breaking through on a grey day. She named the Trombino ring The Essence of Yellow. 

In Taormina, Silvestri herself wore a Tubogas choker of hollow golden cords, set with five electric-blue tanzanite cabochons. “Each of these colours touches an emotion,” she says, “their depth and mutability within the stone make them so alive.” 

Every summer, she retreats to a bare Apulian trullo – just a table, a chair, a bed, and nothing more. Only the Mediterranean before her eyes. A pulsating splendour, and within its shimmer, all the colours under the sun. bulgari.com

Cartier in Balance

As light as air, the Cartier panther prepares to leap.

Between her paws gleams a magnificent diamond. Emerald beads and diamonds along the necklace tinkle softly, like the rustle of leaves. Jacqueline Karachi speaks of balance. “From the clarity of line to the strength of volume, everything must be in harmony. Just like the balance of colours, and the space between fullness and emptiness,” she explains, having worked at Cartier’s atelier for 30 years before becoming creative director of haute joaillerie. She follows in the footsteps of the legendary Jeanne Toussaint, once known as la panthère. “At Cartier, everything is built on experience; you have to have inhaled the house’s elegance,” Karachi says. “That takes years. Nothing is excessive, neither simplicity nor extravagance.” Symmetry and asymmetry, harmony at Cartier, is distilled from the union of opposing forces. 

Each creation is a high-wire act of artistry. Emerald green, diamond white, and onyx black – from these contrasts, Cartier once defined itself. 

“The real challenge lies in translating aesthetic intention into technical perfection,” adds Alexa Abitbol, head of the haute joaillerie workshop. “Everything depends on the precision and mastery of our craftsmen.” Only then does la panthère come alive, and leap! cartier.com 

Floating with Chanel

Lions, stars, wings. Two and a half years ago, Chanel’s head of high jewellery, Patrice Leguéreau, created the collection Reach for the Stars. And now we stand before his graceful creations – diamond stars accented with black lacquer and onyx, rubellites and pigeon-blood rubies, but above all, his necklaces with angel wings, bearing names like Embrace Your Destiny and The Sky is the Limit. It all felt like a premonition for the quiet, sensitive man who was “inside the mind of Chanel”. 

Patrice Leguéreau (who passed away last autumn) translated its spirit so perfectly into jewels and the present. And yet, his creations remain a bow to life itself and to the strength of women. 

Where else do two lion heads become wings? Or diamond crochet chains drape around the neck as lightly as a chiffon scarf? There is something wonderfully alive about these pieces. Two angel wings joined by a Padparadscha sapphire, for instance, or a pink stone set in a teardrop of diamonds, appearing to float upward. 

And suddenly the question arises, one that once fascinated Chanel herself – what do you call a girl with wings? Before Leguéreau’s creations (and before the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the nearby Louvre), the answer is the same... Victory! A triumph of beauty. chanel.com

Animal Love by Chopard

Caroline Scheufele is a child of the seventies, so she can almost definitely hum along to the Flipper song (everyone knows that clever dolphin!). But animals have always been part of her life, and now they are also part of her new Red Carpet collection, which she calls Caroline’s Universe. “I’ve always had dogs around me,” says the co-president of Chopard, speaking about her Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Byron, who has become something of a mascot for the Cannes Film Festival (and whom she immortalised in a magnificent ring set with white, black, and cognac-coloured diamonds). Then there’s the dolphin, leaping around the wrist like a sapphire-blue wave. 

Growing up in Pforzheim as the daughter of Chopard’s founding family, Scheufele now lives her passions – cinema, her 

paradisiacal garden by Lake Geneva, couture, and a deep commitment to environmental and animal protection. In 2013, she was among the first to introduce ethical gold and fair-trade gemstones into haute joaillerie. Green glamour, she calls it. 

Naturally, her latest creations also premiered at the 78^th Festival de Cannes – exactly 78 pieces, one for each year of the festival’s history. “Each piece of jewellery tells a chapter of my life,” she says, “a scene in which haute joaillerie reflects my own journey...but also a universal emotion.” chopard.com 

Dior and the Joy of Childhood

“Actually,” Dior’s jewellery enchantress Victoire de Castellane once told me, “it’s always about that one magical moment I experienced as a child, when a little treasure appeared in the gumball machine.” That spark of wonder has never left her. Though her Dior creations are crafted from the rarest gemstones rather than plastic trinkets, the feeling she chases remains the same – delight.

For de Castellane, jewellery is not about carats or status. It’s about emotion. 

Each collection captures that fleeting, heart-stirring moment when beauty surprises us, when imagination takes form in colour and light. Over the decades, she has built a universe within Dior Joaillerie where fantasy reigns – miniature worlds of enamel flowers, cosmic landscapes, and dreamlike creatures that seem to belong to another realm. 

Her work is deeply personal, often inspired by memories, stories, and the thrill of transformation. “It’s about that moment of discovery,” she once said, “when the ordinary becomes extraordinary.” 

Whether she’s crafting a ring that resembles a blooming garden or a necklace alive with movement and light, her jewels possess a narrative quality, a touch of mischief, romance, and mystery that mirrors her own artistic spirit. 

In Dior’s world of high jewellery, de Castellane reminds us that luxury is not just about brilliance, but about emotion – the kind that transports you back to childhood, when a small treasure could set your imagination alight. dior.com

The Virtue of Louis Vuitton

A fairytale procession unfolded within Palma’s Gothic fortress, Castell de Bellver, with jewel-adorned models led by Bond girl Ana de Armas. The presentation was a look at Louis Vuitton’s new Haute Joaillerie collection, a dazzling display where gemstones reigned supreme.

Among them, a lush green Brazilian emerald of 37.75 carats gleams at the centre of the platinum Apogée necklace, while a peacock-blue indigolite tourmaline shimmers as an amulet on a white-gold chain. At the heart of the diamond necklace Eternal Sun radiates a 14-carat yellow diamond. One of the models wears a choker whose golden triangular spikes, studded with diamonds, evoke the nails of an ancient relic, fittingly named Savoir. From the largest ‘V’, set with a fiery black opal, drips a Zambian emerald. And the pearl collar of intertwined white and yellow gold cords, blazing with a ruby’s red flame, might well have adorned Catherine de’ Medici herself. 

These are jewels of medieval magnificence, pieces poised between craftsmanship and art. It is precisely in this in-between realm that Francesca Amfitheatrof has always placed her métier. After seven magical years as the creative mastermind behind Louis Vuitton’s Haute Joaillerie, she bid farewell this spring, passing the baton to her atelier team. With Virtuosity, a collection of 110 one-of-a-kind pieces, the team presents reimagined versions of the house’s iconic Monogram and Damier motifs, transformed through near-Old-Master virtuosity into golden fabrics of stars and flowers, lace and brocade. Unsurprisingly, Amfitheatrof always insisted that the true masterminds are, in fact, the artisans of the atelier. louisvuitton.com

Piaget’s Glow-up

It is a quarter past turquoise... That magnificent Extraleganza necklace, strung with turquoise and malachite beads, and set with a yellow Indiana Jones sapphire, is actually a watch, but perhaps that’s beside the point. One only has the vaguest sense of time – the diamond-framed dial seems to count only the beautiful hours, even though, of course, a Swiss precision movement ticks inside. 

“Piaget’s passion for haute horlogerie and high jewellery comes together in this piece,” says creative director Stéphanie Sivrière, who oversees both métiers. For her, it’s about colour harmonies, the interplay of soft green and blue nuances with the effervescent yellow of the sapphire, a chromatic keyboard she also plays with in a necklace and earrings crafted from troilites and chrysoprase, their geometric forms recalling the modular furniture designs of Mario Bellini.

It’s a nod to the 1960s and ’70s, when Yves Piaget was the jeweller to the jet set. At the grand gala at Paris’ Palais Mona Bismarck, Ella Richards (the daughter of Rolling Stones legend Keith Richards) dazzles in the jewels. In the former city palace of the famous men’s and jewellery collector, all heads turn toward her – Ella est là. A gentle glow underlines her every gesture…

A few days later, Sivrière sits back in her Geneva studio and explains that she test-wears each of these one-of-a-kind pieces “to see, or rather, to feel, whether it perfectly embraces the body”. Her greatest inspiration, she says, comes from creative spirits like young Parisian artist Alex Palenski, with whom she recently designed a kinetic table clock. Made of turquoise and chrysoprase, it moves as if by magic, stirred only by a passing breeze. piaget.com

With Messika in Africa

“Valériiiie!” Kisses, congratulations, embraces. We barely make it three steps into the glittering presentation rooms of the Hôtel de Crillon, under crystal chandeliers in golden-hued salons where her new creations are displayed in glass cases, before someone else rushes up to Valérie Messika, eager to speak with her – “Excusez-moi, juste un moment…” A French TV crew is there, as are journalists, friends, and her brothers. There’s good reason to celebrate, too – 20 years of Messika. 

Yes, it’s been two decades since she announced to her family – one of Paris’ renowned diamond-dealing dynasties – that she wanted to design jewellery herself. No more traditional engagement rings, but pieces that would offer glamorous women like Natalia Vodianova or Carla Bruni a touch of audacious extravagance. 

Year after year, Messika has created pieces of exquisite craftsmanship. Now, for the first time, we have jewels in colour.“The natural phenomena of Africa’s vast, raw landscapes, the warm ochre of the savannahs and dunes, the emerald green of the forests, those sunsets where everything sinks into orange and violet, left me no choice,” she says. She called the collection Terres d’Instinct (Lands of Instinct). The thunder of Victoria Falls is captured in a waterfall necklace of cascading diamonds. A lion’s paw, soft and full of restrained power, sculpted in brushed yellow gold. A collar so masterfully set enserti neige with diamonds that one can almost feel Africa’s shimmering heat, with two sapphires as blindingly yellow as the sun itself. 

Later, standing on the hotel balcony, the traffic of Place de la Concorde murmurs below. Valérie Messika breathes in the rain-soaked Paris air and speaks of Namibia, where the diamonds for her creations are sourced. 

“Twenty years, that’s not even the blink of an eye compared to the millions of years these stones have existed,” she says, falling silent for a moment. “If there’s one thing my work has taught me, it’s humility before nature and that we must savour every moment of our brief lives. Now.” messika.com 

Pomellato on How Yesterday Became Today 

Since 1967, the founding year of Pomellato, the Milanese jewellery house’s (rocker) chains and Colliers de chien have shaken up the jewellery scene. Five years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, they ascended into the realm of haute joaillerie. Vincenzo Castaldo burst into Pomellato’s Paris showroom slightly out of breath. “The plane is delayed!” he exclaimed, spreading his arms. Raindrops glittered on his jacket, but his mood couldn’t have been brighter. 

Most of the high-jewellery pieces were already gone, sold within two weeks of their debut at a gala in Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera. Necklaces, rings, and bracelets that embodied the spirit of the Maison – unconventional, unmistakable, bold.

With Collezione 1967, the creative director has captured the essence of three decades, the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. “I found it fascinating to look at the codes of those eras through today’s eyes and reinterpret them,” he says. “1967 was the year of so many emancipation movements in which women were breaking chains.” 

He jumps ahead to the 1990s, which, like the 1980s and its power dressing, he equates with a flamboyance. Even amid Helmut Lang’s minimalism? “Versace!” counters Castaldo, who came to Milan from Tuscany in 1992, became a fashion designer for maximalists Dolce & Gabbana, and remembers the nineties as one big celebration, a time of liberation. Now, he rekindles that spirit in his Pomellato creations, letting the chains glow in every gemstone colour of the rainbow. “No future without the lessons of the past,” says Castaldo. “Especially in times like these.” pomellato.com 

Van Cleef & Arpels in Flora’s Garden

When he was still the Prince of Wales, King Charles III began strolling through the gardens of the Scottish estate Dumfries House. It was there that Van Cleef & Arpels recently unveiled a collection of florally inspired jewels aptly titled The Gardens of Flora. Following Treasure Island, last year’s whimsical journey to RL Stevenson’s world of adventure, the maison’s atelier team has brought fantasy to life again, after Nicolas Bos’ appointment as CEO of the Richemont Group. 

Since the marriage of Estelle Arpels and Alfred Van Cleef in 1906 and the founding of their Parisian house, the maison has been a specialist in all that blooms within the imagination. In these realms, a chrysanthemum can conceal a tiny watch, its hands whirling busily in a circle, almost like delicate insects or perhaps pistils. When the lid is closed, the jewelled blossom wraps itself around the wrist, and reminds us of time slipping away. That is also what the brooch with stylised amaryllis blossoms seems to whisper. Yellow and orange, set with diamonds, white as mother-of-pearl and adorned with red carnelian petals, it appears, despite its stylisation, as though pollen might drift from it and bees might hum nearby. 

As Nicolas Bos once said, “We create jewelled poems, so stylised that in their simplification, or rather, their condensation that one can see straight into the heart of things.” And sometimes, the heart of a flower is a dial. vancleefarpels.com