Michelle Yeoh turns 64 this week, and her jewellery box had almost as good a year as she did

Six days later, on February 18, Yeoh received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, honoured by directors Jon M Chu and Ang Lee. She paired her yellow Dior dress with a tennis bracelet and drop earrings, all built around a white gold Richard Mille encrusted with baguette diamonds and worth US$1 million. It’s arguably the single most expensive jewellery moment of her year, and the clearest example of her usual formula: a simple dress, and one serious piece of jewellery doing the heavy lifting.

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At the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, Yeoh layered several strands of pearls at the neckline—a shorter pearl collar sitting close to the throat, under a longer sautoir-length strand that runs well past the lapel and ends in a diamond-set tassel drop. A single pearl-and-diamond pendant sits where the strands meet at the centre. She matched this with pearl drop earrings tipped with a small diamond cap and a delicate ear cuff on the upper ear, plus what looks like a slim emerald or jade cocktail ring on her right hand. It’s a pearl-led moment—closer in spirit to her Mikimoto appearances than to the diamond-heavy looks earlier in the year. Her jewellery was paired with a white suit ensemble from the Maison Margiela Spring/Summer 2026 collection.

By the time Paris Haute Couture Week came around in July, Yeoh’s Mikimoto relationship had been formalised. She became the face of the house’s global campaign, “1893 Mikimoto—Time on a String,” announced back in March, and the pearl house’s high jewellery presentation at Hôtel d’Évreux during couture week—staged in the same stretch as her Chanel and Schiaparelli appearances—was the clearest evidence yet that pearls, not just diamonds, had become part of her signature.

At Chanel’s Autumn/Winter show that same week, the story flipped entirely. Yeoh deliberately kept her jewellery understated, letting a new platinum crop and an embroidered tweed skirt suit take the attention instead. For someone who usually treats jewellery as the headline rather than the footnote, it read as an intentional change of mood, not an oversight.

Later that month, Comic-Con brought a different kind of jewellery moment again: turquoise pieces and black beaded bracelets, worn with a Schiaparelli look for the panel circuit. Less fine jewellery, more personality accessory—proof that not every notable jewellery choice in her year needed a price tag attached to it.

None of this happens in isolation from her watch collection, which has shaped her jewellery choices for over fifteen years. Michelle Yeoh co-designed two of Richard Mille’s women’s pieces herself back in 2011, working directly with the watchmaker’s then artistic director on the diamond-set RM 051 and RM 51-01 Tourbillon, both built around a phoenix motif tied to her heritage. That history, alongside her newer role as the face of Mikimoto, is worth remembering on a birthday that also marks a career turn from Crazy Rich Asians and Everything Everywhere All at Once to this year’s It’s My Time, Michelle Yeoh’s jewellery has tracked her range almost as closely as her scripts have.

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