Cover Tatler reports from Paris couture week on the state of high jewellery at Place Vendôme (Photo: courtesy of Hermès)
Tatler reports from Paris couture week on the state of high jewellery at Place Vendôme (Photo: courtesy of Hermès)
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Tatler’s regional editor of watches and jewellery reports from the salons of Place Vendôme during Paris couture week, where Boucheron engraved smoky quartz, Fred unlocked a 101-carat diamond and Cartier held some cards back until September
Paris hit 34 degrees the week I arrived, and nobody talked about anything else. Inside the salons of Place Vendôme the air conditioning runs at something close to arctic, the sparkling water arrives before you have sat down, and there is a collective agreement among editors never to mention how anybody looks by day three. Outside, the square is a griddle. You cross it anyway.
I had ten appointments across three days. This is the part of the job that photographs well and behaves badly, a run of white gloves and velvet trays and maison representatives watching your face for the precise moment you work out what you are holding. Here is how it went.
In case you missed it: Inside Chaumet's French escapade with Gulf, Song Hye Kyo, Li Bingbing and more for A Journey Through Nature
Day one: About being human
Light (Photo: courtesy of Boucheron)
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Boucheron at 4.30pm
Upstairs at 26 Place Vendôme, where Claire Choisne has spent a decade making the rest of us recalibrate what the phrase “high jewellery” is allowed to mean. This year’s Carte Blanche is called Human Being, and it is built on an idea that sounds simple until you see it executed: five cluster necklaces sharing a single design blueprint, each rendered through a completely different craft, so that the same silhouette arrives five separate times as five separate objects.
The morganite necklace called ‘Light’ is the one that empties the room. More than 1,500 carats of it, paved with diamonds, roughly 3,200 hours of work. ‘Flower’ carries micro-miniature floral paintings on pink quartz, finished with lacquer and diamonds. ‘Tattoo’ takes more than 580 carats of smoky quartz and hand-etches Victorian tattoo motifs into it—a technique, Choisne told us, that has almost vanished from the trade. She said she wanted to imagine a ‘Rain’ of diamonds falling on the skin. What she has actually done is engineer the jewellery towards invisibility, so that only the stones and the hands that shaped them remain.
I left thinking about the engraving rather than the carats, which is not how I usually leave Boucheron.
Day two: nine to five, five houses, zero lunch
Étreintes earrings (Photo: courtesy of Hermès)
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9am, Hermès, Into the Horsescape
Starting a jewellery day at Paris couture week at nine in the morning is an act of violence and I say that with love. Hermès returns to horses every two years and somehow keeps finding new territory. Pierre Hardy put it well: the horse itself is barely seen, and its symbolism lives inside each piece, sometimes turning metaphorical. Clou de Forge Lumière takes a blacksmith’s nail and rebuilds it in diamonds. Étreintes wraps elongated bits around exceptional emeralds. Black jade stands in for the texture of a hoof, brown diamonds for the warmth of a coat. Lasso Disco is exactly as fun as its name promises. Everything articulates, everything moves, nothing sits still against the body.
Read more: Van Cleef & Arpels expands Perlée with six new stacking rings
Serenissima Collection Bracelet (Photo: courtesy of Buccellati)
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11am, Buccellati, Serenissima
From Parisian abstraction to Venetian lace in one taxi ride. Buccellati has taken Renaissance goldsmithing and scaled it up: engraved gold, openwork, diamonds that behave rather than shout. The cuff is the piece, set with nearly 14 carats of rose-cut diamonds and landing on the wrist like nothing at all. This is the house’s oldest trick and it still works on me every single time.
Impetuosa necklace inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Photo: courtesy of Damiani)
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12 noon, Damiani, Arte Maestra
Eight canonical artworks turned into jewellery is, on paper, the sort of concept I brace myself for. Damiani has taken Caravaggio’s Medusa, Botticelli’s Primavera, Jeong Seon’s A Leisurely Cat in Autumn, Kandinsky’s Grey Form, Klimt’s The Kiss, Monet’s Water Lilies, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and rebuilt each one as a jewel that works as both faithful reproduction and independent object. The Great Wave is the piece that dismantled my scepticism, its swell constructed from diamonds, blue sapphires and Paraíba tourmalines, with Mount Fuji rising behind it as a single triangular diamond. Paris couture week keeps getting better.
L'éclat Originel worn by Michelle Yeoh at the presentation (Photo: courtesy of Mikimoto)
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2pm, Mikimoto, L’Éclat
The Japanese pearl house went looking for light and came back with the cosmos—the aurora, starlight, the diffuse glow at the bottom of the ocean. Akoya pearls sit against tourmalines, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds in starburst and galaxy formations. There is a shoulder brooch anchored by a 100-carat aquamarine, and a headpiece that took thousands of hours and is, I suspect, destined for a museum vitrine rather than a head. I looked up from it to find Michelle Yeoh a few feet away greeting Japanese actor Ken Watanabe like old friends. Mikimoto spent thousands of hours engineering starlight and then filled the room with it.
Plume de Vie clip (Photo: courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels)
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5pm, Van Cleef & Arpels, Fascinating Egypt
The maison has been circling Egypt since the 1910s, and this collection reads as a hundred-year fascination finally given the run of the archive. Lotus motifs, art deco geometry, and the Beauté Légendaire necklace centred on a 10.02-carat fancy vivid yellow diamond. The Plume de Vie clip is the piece I would fight someone for: emeralds, rubies, sapphires, coral, chrysoprase, turquoise, onyx and diamonds across white, rose and yellow gold. Archaeology run through the maison’s own imagination rather than reproduced.
Day three: the sun, the greenhouse and a triangle
Soleil d’Or Golden Light necklace (Photo: courtesy of Fred)
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1pm, Fred, Monsieur Fred Golden Light
Fred turns 90 this year and closes the Monsieur Fred trilogy with 15 one-off pieces tracing the light of the French Riviera from the blues of night to the gold of sunrise. Tanzanites, Australian opals, Colombian emeralds, Sri Lankan yellow sapphires. Moonlight Reflection holds almost 65 carats of velvety tanzanite in blued titanium claws.
And then the Soleil d’Or: 101.57 carats of fancy intense yellow diamond, first found by the house in 1977, sold unmounted, bought back in 2021 for the patrimony, and set into a jewel for the very first time. Valérie Samuel’s Golden Light necklace floats more than 1,025 diamonds—around 137 carats—on fil couteau lines of yellow gold. The central motif detaches as a brooch. It is also not for sale. Whoever buys the necklace receives it with an 11.25-carat yellow diamond instead, and the Soleil d’Or goes back into the vault. I have rarely watched a room of editors fall for something so hard while being told, politely, no.
Coffee Aroma necklace (Photo: courtesy of Chaumet)
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2.30pm, Chaumet, A Journey Through Nature
Two hundred and forty years of calling yourself a naturalist jeweller buys you the right to do this properly. The collection reaches back to the greenhouse of Empress Joséphine, the maison’s most famous patron, which once held the largest collection of plant species in Paris, and organises 46 pieces into three chapters: Botanic Freshness, Spicy Sweetness and Aromatic Warmth. Those last two are what make the collection worth the appointment, because they licence Chaumet to jewel things a jeweller does not usually touch, and so the leaves and petals give way to pepper, vanilla and coffee. There is a tiara built from peppercorns, which I did not expect to want. The Vanilla Flower necklace is the high point, turning the pods into curved diamond-set motifs that frame a 10.71-carat D flawless type IIa diamond. As a coffee obsessive, I would like it noted that a maison has finally put my morning ritual into a tiara-adjacent context.
Tutti Kanya necklace (Photo: courtesy of Cartier)
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I finally saw Le Choeur des Pierres up close. The first chapter was unveiled in Saint-Tropez in May and runs to more than 125 unique pieces and upwards of 85,000 hours of work, so seeing it during Paris couture week rather than in Mediterranean glare is a different proposition entirely. The name is a pun that survives translation badly and rewards it anyway: choeur is a chorus, coeur is a heart, and the two sound identical. Jacqueline Karachi-Langane’s position is that the creation exists to serve the stone, revealing its nuances and its inner vibration, and the collection holds her to it.
Tutti Kanya carries the blue-red-green pairing Cartier once treated as heresy and now treats as signature, closing on a 30.33-carat engraved Zambian emerald. Panthère Kentia is built around a 50-carat cabochon Ceylon sapphire, the panther herself sculpted in three dimensions with emerald eyes and custom-cut onyx markings. The Auralis ring sets six pear-cut pink diamonds from the shuttered Argyle mine—a supply that no longer exists and cannot be replaced. Tellura assembles 30 uniquely shaped diamonds and still manages to hold its own in a collection this loud with colour.
A further group of pieces stays under wraps until September. I have seen them. I am contractually incapable of telling you about them until autumn, which I mention only so that you know to come back.
All pavé ring (Photo: courtesy of Vhernier)
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7pm, Vhernier, Freccia high jewellery collection
The correct way to end a jewellery week is with Milan. Vhernier has returned to the triangle it first sculpted in 2014 and built five suites from the modular repetition of one shape. Mirror-polished white gold alternating with the house’s two-prong pavé. Colour arrives through trasparenze, layering rock crystal over black jade, green jade, lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl until the colour seems lit from inside. The earclips detach from studs into pendants. After three days of narrative, symbolism and archives, an evening of pure geometry felt like a cold drink.
Every roundup will tell you this was the season of colour, and every roundup is right. I stopped counting Paraíba tourmalines somewhere around Damiani. Rubellite by the tens of carats, emerald, lapis, turquoise, onyx—even the great diamond houses came out in colour this year.
The more interesting story sits underneath. Lab-grown stones have made perfection cheap, so the industry has moved towards what cannot be replicated: exceptional gemstones, provenance, heritage, and the near-extinct hand skills needed to turn one into the other. Boucheron reviving an engraving technique. Vhernier’s trasparenze. Chaumet reading a 240-year-old garden. Fred setting a stone it has owned for half a century and refusing to sell it. Rarity has become the design brief.
Our collectors in Asia have understood this for a while. They ask about the stone before the story, and they ask where it came from. Paris, this July, was speaking their language—at 34 degrees, in ten appointments, with very good air conditioning.
As the Regional Editor for Watches and Jewellery and Editorial Content Lead for Tatler GMT, Amrita Katara specialises in luxury watch and jewellery coverage across Asia, with expertise in editorial strategy, feature writing and interviews with industry leaders. Her past roles span luxury lifestyle media and client partnerships. Based in Mumbai, Amrita’s work bridges global trends and Asian market insights.
