A shower of carats and precious stones flooded Paris during its Fashion Week in June. The jewelers played with every shade of precious and semi-precious stones like painters with their palette. From vibrant to pastel colors, in a play of shades and chiaroscuro, the combinations were as endless as nature is generous. With cabochon, faceted, buff top, classic or fantasy cuts, rough or barely polished stones and ‘baroque’ cuts, etc., gem and diamond cutters are becoming increasingly creative, and fascinate us with their imagination.
Cartier, Triomphale Ring, white gold, Mozambique 8,95 carats ruby and diamonds
In four jewelry sets, Fred has created a blaze of opals, spinels, garnets, rubellites, Colombian emeralds and Sri Lankan sapphires at the heart of his new Monsieur Fred Ideal Light collection, evokingthe skies and seascapes, the culture and folklore of Argentina, where the founder, Fred Samuel, spent his childhood. The collection pays tribute to this love of light that has become his hallmark style.
The intensity of light (this time Italian) at Bulgari. To mark its 140th anniversary, Bulgari unveiled the Aeterna collection. Fabulous watch bracelets with lockets illustrate a phoenix displaying its plumage or a sparkling firework display in a dazzling array of precious stones. Among the many other jewels, is the centerpiece of this 140th anniversary, a flamboyant 140-carat diamond necklace, revealing 7 pear-cut DFL drop beads cut from a single 200-carat rough.
At Graff, a profusion of fancy yellow diamonds is set in necklaces and rings in a sparkling cocoon of white diamonds. The three rings were very eye-catching by their volume and highly architectural design, highlighting solar yellow diamonds, along with a bracelet set with Colombian emeralds (including a very fine kyte emerald) and another with rubies.
Yellow and white diamonds were also exclusively on show at Messika through Midnight Sun, dedicated to the dawn light, that timeless moment when night gives way to the promise of day. Playing with contrasts and exploring chiaroscuro, Valérie Messika has created asymmetrical sets, such as this beautiful 3.55-carat pear-cut set at an angle on the snow-set White Midnight Sun choker (2,400 stones all aligned in a perfect curve). Then, inspired by the concept of fullness and emptiness, her Diamond Frequencies design has reinvented the river of diamonds as a multi-strand of oval gold circles, randomly filled with diamonds.
Pomellato’s approach was to move from shadow to light, culminating in an explosion of color. He illustrated this in a highly original way by dividing his The Dualism of Milan collection into two chapters, reflecting the dual nature of Milan’s personality, its industrial, industrious side and its luminous side, a city of fashion at the cutting edge of creativity. Night skies, dark blue spinels on a carpet of diamonds are set against luminous tourmalines, tanzanites, spinels and peridots. Large ‘baroque-cut’ stones are simply polished, retaining their original shape while adapting to an irregular setting.
Light and shade were also the theme of the new Carte Blanche Or Bleu collection by Boucheron. Abandoning the vibrant polychromy of its 2023 session, Creative Director Claire Choisne drew her inspiration from a trip to Iceland, where she was struck by the power and movement of water. Designed in the shape of waterfalls (a diamond string falling like a cascade down to the ankles), as well as lakes, waves and undulating movements of diamond-studded rock crystal. The pieces of jewelry also play with marble and obsidian. But there is a clear break with the compacted black sand jewelry sets that have given Boucheron’s Carte Blanche creations their distinctive cachet.
Jewelers love to tell stories. Their heritage is an eternal source of inspiration. Cartier, for example, is inspired by nature and the animals it has designed for its famous customers. At the heart of this Nature Sauvage neo-bestiary, the panther has retained a special place. Never has Cartier reproduced it in so many sets, in equilibrium on gems: This sparkling, watchful, studded, dreamlike and evanescent Ice Panther climbing down onto its ice floe of kyte diamonds and rock crystal was a challenge for the craftsmen and women. Several levels had to be superimposed to recreate the depth and transparency of the ice, while maintaining an articulated composition that is perfectly harmonious to the eye. The mastery of volume, the precision of the design and the excellence of the craftsmanship brings these majestic felines to life, whose mystery (the animals are hidden) stirs the imagination.
Also very attached to its bestiary, De Beers Jewellers unveiled the 8 animal rings it presented last January as a tribute to the fauna of southern Africa, the region from which its diamonds originate. The little treasure in the Forces of Nature collection is a rare bright orange diamond weighing more than 2 carats and surrounded by polished and rough diamonds, creating a modernity that only De Beers could dare. The collection was appreciated for its subtlety of shades (many yellow, brown, green, grey, orange diamonds…) and cuts (a mix of faceted and rough).
Three playful themes – dance, magic and music – inspired Chaumet to create its Chaumet en Scène collection. True to its style, the Maison has designed its pieces as lines of light that twist and coil as if with an invisible breath, creating optical illusions. The Harmony necklace, with its flowing interlacing diamonds and Chaumet blue sapphires (700 settings and 2,800 claws), is punctuated by an 8.72-carat pear-cut DFL Type IIA diamond. The twisted line of the Illusion necklace holds six superb oval raspberry rubies while each pattern of the Ballet necklace seems to be a feather swept by the breeze. The movement and purity of the three pure cushion-cut Ceylon sapphires of 8.03, 5.79 and 5.77 carats captures the very essence of Chaumet!
It took 13 themes to unveil all 220 pieces from Louis Vuitton‘s Awakened Hands, Awakened Minds collection. In the 19th century, when Paris became the center of the world, French arts and crafts were renowned the world over. The inventiveness of the period has been transposed into exceptional pieces of jewelry, celebrating the effervescent era that saw the birth of the Eiffel Tower. It is this that dominates the Louis Vuitton campaign (click here), laced with gold thread and featuring a rare 56.23-carat orange-pink diamond, mined in Borneo. The most sophisticated necklace in the collection, Seduction, required 4,276 hours of work and over 900 hours of development.
Never has color so inspired Pierre Hardy at Hermès, whose fine jewelry pieces Les formes de la couleur lit up the display at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs with a rainbow of colors. Beyond pure aesthetics, Pierre Hardy’s work was more about experience, symbolism, the perception of color and its possible interpretations: a shape associated with a color, nuances that vibrate and pixelate, escaping reality, a brushstroke that metamorphoses into a trail of precious stones… The gradations of color flow in waves, making the shapes ondulate, reaching a crescendo, which – also at Hermès – moves from shadow to light. The collection abounded in a thousand shades, as if the pieces had been painted by some enthusiastic artist in love.
Image de première page : Chaumet
