The Best Haute Jewels At Paris Couture Week

You can’t get more haute than Paris in late January. During Couture Week in the French capital, January 27-30, some of the top houses also showcased their new high jewelry collections. And just like their runway cousins, the high jewelry pieces on show represent the pinnacle of their art form, with the highest level of artisanship and the most exquisite materials.

Take Boucheron, whose Histoire de Style collection each January sees the design team dive into the archives for inspiration, to honor the house’s history. This year’s Untamed Nature collection took them back to the late 1800s and the work of Frédéric Boucheron, who transposed rather than transformed nature into jewelry.

“I wanted to show the strength of nature even though it’s delicate,” said Boucheron’s creative director, Claire Choisne, and the result was an exquisite 18-piece collection of plants and insects, in diamonds, white gold and mother of pearl. The spectacular carrot flower brooch was created using wax carving and also metalwork, in an effort to get closer to Boucheron’s original techniques, while slivers of mother of pearl brought a moth brooch’s wings to life.

Another house which looked back to move forwards, was Mellerio, France’s oldest jeweler. Ever adept at referencing the past in a way that makes contemporary jewels highly desirable, the Pierreries necklace features archive details like granulation in a soft palette of dusky rose quartz, opals, morganite, kunzite and lavender quartz, set in green, rose and yellow gold.

Honoring the gardens and forests around Christian Dior’s home at Milly-la-Forêt, the Milly Dentelle collection was a glittering profusion of rainbow foliage. Visitors to Villa Dior for the presentation entered a network of flower-filled pathways, punctuated with showcases that dazzled with gemstone flowers blooming on precious metal structures inspired by lace. The showstopping flower pendants with seemingly bottomless black opal centers were stand-out pieces.

A showstopper also, at Graff. The London house showed -- or nearly didn’t, due to a customs delay — the magnificent Gift of Love diamond necklace, which was over three years in the making. Aphrodite’s sparrows hold a glittering 13.51 carat yellow diamond drop, which can be removed and worn apart from the fluid articulated diamond choker, in a high jewelry masterpiece made all the more impactful by being presented alone.

One of the freshest and most modern-looking collections was Chaumet Bamboo, a 10-piece capsule in a palette of white diamonds, textured gold, opals and tsavorites. With a second chapter coming in the summer, the collection had all the elegant movement of a bamboo lawn swaying in the breeze. Although Chaumet is known for rich representations of nature, it’s the first time the house has explored bamboo, and the result was a striking, stylized series for jewels some of which — like the hair clip-brooch — was transformable.

Repossi took visitors far from Place Vendôme, to an historic wood panelling atelier near Place des Ternes, where the scene was set for the reveal of Jewels for the Home, a collaboration with the Invisible Collection. Designers reinterpreted four of Repossi’s greatest hits as homewares: the Berbère jewelry box, by Louise Liljencrantz; the Antifer lamp, by Charles Zana; the Blast mirror by Courtney Applebaum, and the Serti sur Vide side tables, by Campbell Rey.

The pieces were shown amongst other vintage treasures sourced by the Collection, deep in the labyrinthine atelier amongst antique wood panelling, cornices and painted screens, in a retranscription of the house’s distinctive design codes into new territory. In the final room, were new pieces including the magnificent Blast diamond cocktail ring pictured further up, made from a single piece of gold wire. More volume, more presence to bridge the design languages of Gaia Repossi and her father Alberto, who led the house in the 1980s and 1990s. And where better than Paris Couture to unveil such a jewel?