PARIS — A season of travelling jewellery showcases came to a close during this haute couture week with historic houses and independent names revealing or showcasing their most recent creations.
Colour continued to rule the collections displayed last week, especially in diamonds, whether it was employed to reinforce old codes or carve out new ones.
Given their abundance in Parisian fashion shows, starting with Graff, where numerous gradations were on display in the “Sunrise” line shown in its Saint-Honoré headquarters, one could have been forgiven for forgetting that yellow ones are rare in nature.
As design director Anne-Eva Geffroy noted, Laurence Graff was among the first to acquire yellow diamonds. “Now for engagement rings, you have more ladies choosing yellow [diamonds] instead of white,” she said.
The centrepiece of the display, a pear-shaped fancy intense yellow diamond weighing 30.28 carats, was flanked by 167 additional carats of yellow and white diamonds on an exclusive necklace. There were, however, many more, such as a necklace constructed of a row of golden brilliant-cut stones bordered by a second row of white stones, and a row of yellow pear-shaped gems that changed into a line of rail-set baguettes.
The founder of Messika, Valérie Messika, noted that this contrast was also prominent there. She said that the brilliant hue of yellow diamonds was accentuated by their spotless equivalents, and vice versa.
The five-set “Midnight Sun” collection, which featured yellow diamonds as a representation of the “brilliance of the sun in the middle of the night” or, more specifically, the glitzy ’70s club scene, honoured her 10th anniversary in high jewellery.
Beyond the stunning pieces that were unveiled, such as the mirror-polish Ultimate Party collar with a 20-carat pear-shaped yellow diamond and a 9-carat cushion-cut diamond that was “made to shine but also to make you feel empowered,” Messika “found it very interesting to [use couture] as a teaser and to subscribe more in the fashion moment, which is quite competitive.”
To speak of high jewellery “in a different way, in a more casual way,” she said, she will reveal 80% of the collection in September during a runway show during Paris Fashion Week. This is especially important at this time when customers are increasingly looking for designs that can be worn rather than stored.
Delfina Delettrez Fendi attributed this ease in high jewellery to the rise of female jewellers and consumers buying high-value items for themselves rather than as gifts. “Before, it was just this opulent aspect and things that were so heavy that you wore them once in a lifetime, then parked them in your safe,” she said.
However, don’t assume that purchases made for oneself are any less significant. “There is a fresh vitality there. Because these tiny objects are an extension [of one’s identity] and they communicate, I frequently claim that examining a woman’s hand is similar to performing an inverted palm reading.
The Fendi Triptych collection, which took a year to create, served as the inspiration for Kim Jones’ elegant yet approachable fall 2023 couture designs. It was divided into three chapters: Roma Rosa, Gioiello Giallo, and Bianco Brillante, which Delettrez Fendi described as “an absence of colour homage to white diamonds.”
The jeweller experimented with interconnected Fs throughout, turning cursive shapes into pseudo-classical curlicues, geometrically entwining them to make an abstract chain link for a necklace, or repeating them in waves. She also mentioned that the “logo inside the logo” that Delettrez Fendi intends to utilise as a signature was a home variation of the baguette cut.
The set of 61 pink spinels that form a crescendo on the Undarum portrait necklace took a specialised collector 40 years to source, she said at a preview of the gems, despite the fact that the 30 designs she imagined for her first full-fledged collection for the Roman house carry a price tag that ranges from $60,000 to $1.3 million.
When confronted with that kind of heritage, she said, “You feel a deep sense of responsibility,” especially when it is added to by the million-year trip the stones made to reach the surface and the background of her family.
High jewellery isn’t exactly a quiet luxury, but De Beers Diamond Jewellers CEO Céline Assimon observed that customers are less interested in “flamboyant presence” and more interested in pieces that may go above and beyond.
Therefore, the second chapter of Metamorphosis, a collection inspired by nature’s changes over the four seasons, contains a variety of designs with detachable components, such as lacquered layers, ring jackets, or diamond embellishments. These aren’t gems that you keep locked up, she said.
The platinum and titanium Winter tiara with its seven diamonds, including the central 8.5-carat pear-cut D-flawless diamond from Natural Works of Art, had inspired a client as a piece to wear as well as a way to showcase gems in her collection, according to Assimon. “The pieces we are showing are conversation starters,” he added.
She added that customers are increasingly discussing and weighing the issue of provenance and traceability before making purchases.
She has noticed a fundamental shift in recent years, including increasingly versatile designs with more casual options; the importance of colour, particularly in diamonds; and the parallel rise in value and decrease in size as clients reached for rarer gems. This shift has been attributed to “healthy competition” and the arrival of “dramatically different points of view between houses.” As Simon stated, “Our goal is to educate the audience, our clients, and our guests by showcasing the variety of colours in diamonds.
Highlights included the 2.03-carat fancy vivid orange diamond presented loose with suggested design sketches and valued north of $11 million, the 2.78-carat fancy intense pinkish-purple cushion on the ring of the Spring set, and the fancy dark green-grey pear-shaped diamond removable pendant on a Winter collar necklace.
Although coloured diamond prices are rising rapidly, Tasaki’s president and CEO Toshikazu Tajima noted that pearls still make up the majority of the company’s collections. “Especially pink now that the [Argyle] mine has been shut down. Customers still want them even though they are 10 times more expensive than they were four or five years ago, he claimed.
The six sets that made up the Japanese jeweller’s Nature Spectacle collection used a variety of colours to convey the sea’s beauty, which was influenced by the locations where its pearls are grown. Diamonds were present, of course, but there were also a variety of sapphires, morganites, and tourmalines to represent the pink lights of a narrow, transparent lagoon in the Flourish set or a graphic torrent of water in the Paraiba and pearls assortment from Cascade.
The executive said that customers were also becoming more attentive to design over the sheer investment value of a jewel’s constituent parts, adding that “customers want something they can wear on a variety of occasions” in this case as well.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak subsided, Chaumet CEO Jean-Marc Mansvelt has also noticed a general trend towards stones of high quality, even at the expense of carat weight.
He added, “We even see it in solitaire rings and more common shapes.
However, that isn’t the largest difficulty that jewellery stores face. Finding the stones has proven to be a difficult and hard task. You could draw a set and find the stones when I first started. We have now made the decision not to begin a design until we have all the stones available.
He ascribed this to a booming high jewellery sector, where both the number of players and customer demand are growing. The “Le Jardin de Chaumet” collection, which examined the natural world and was a repeating motif for the house, did not feel as scarce as before.
Best in the collection were the Ecorce set, which featured a 50.61 black Australian opal on the necklace bursting through gem-encrusted bark; the graphic sweep of calla lilies in the Arum designs, with yellow Ceylon sapphires and diamonds; and the Blé necklace, which had a naturalistic crown of ears of wheat that came paired with a sharp line of diamonds and could be worn three different ways.
Although multiple wears or sharing sets were still effective strategies for keeping pieces out of vaults, the Chaumet executive claimed that the availability of such designs—11 may transform here—had less to do with fashion and more to do with customers’ enthusiastic reception. Everyone is aware of the playful aspect of doing your own thing and dressing whichever you choose, he said.
Playfulness was undoubtedly included in every element of Boucheron’s More Is More collection, which was part of the brand’s yearly Carte Blanche summer offering.
She conceived larger-than-life sculptures that played on basic volumes and big scale to produce delight, taking inspiration from both the Memphis Group and the world of comic strips. The collection was imagined around the end of 2020 when France was going through its second lockdown.
Large cocktail rings made of Murano glass or rock crystal spheres filled with yellow sapphires, brooches shaped like hoodie drawstrings, hair scrunchies with tsavorite-encrusted baubles, and an absurd XXL hair bow paved in diamonds and made from bio acetate and magnesium, a metal 10 times lighter than gold, were just a few of Choisne’s creations.
