The 9 Top High Jewelry Moments from Paris Couture Week
Place Vendôme may not be the exact center of Paris, but it is the undisputed epicenter of high jewelry. Each July, as a glittering crowd of collectors, editors, and celebrities descend upon the French capital for the Fall-Winter Haute Couture season, the legendary jewelry houses that populate the historic, octagonal public square—once dedicated to Louis XIV—unveil their most ambitious creations. This year’s offerings probed to be exceptioanally transcendent, with jewelry houses pushing the limits of their craft to explore such themes as art, nature, symbolism, and even the very essence of humanity.
1. Boucheron
Boucheron’s yearly Carte Blanche collection allows creative director Claire Choisne the unbridled freedom to explore visionary themes for her high jewelry presentations. She never disappoints. For 2026, she introduces “Human Being,” a collection of five cluster necklaces and coordinating rings that, while sharing a singular design blueprint, each manifest as a completely distinct sculptural masterpiece.
“The idea is that we are all the same, yet we are each unique,” Choisne explained during intimate presentations in Paris. “So, the cluster necklace form is like the body—the same framework for everyone—but then we use different colors, stones, and exceptional savoir-faire techniques to show how each individual is different.” In an era increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and digital simulation, Choisne felt compelled to champion the irreplaceable magic of the human touch. The creation of the collection was a monumental undertaking of raw human patience, requiring over 14,000 hours of dedicated craftsmanship.
The iterations—Rain, Flower, Light, Tattoo, and Checkers—also demonstrate the wide range of humans. For Rain, Choisne mimics a glittering diamond waterfall cascading down the skin, meticulously layering white gold and 210 hollowed-out rock crystal droplets, inside of which more than 4,800 diamonds are individually suspended. To bring Flower to life, Boucheron enlisted an expert painter of micro-miniatures to hand-paint wallpaper-inspired floral designs directly onto soft pink rose quartz, requiring 1,200 hours of delicate work. Tattoo similarly honors traditional craftsmanship, utilizing ancient glyptic reverse-carving techniques to etch iconic archival motifs—including the poppy, rose, and serpent—into 580 carats of smoky quartz to evoke the second-skin feel of Victorian body art. It is a stunning visual reminder that the closer you look, the more beauty you discover, both in high jewelry and in humanity itself.
2. Damiani
Several jewelers looked towards art as inspiration for their collections. For its “Arte Maestro” collection, the Italian jewelry brand, founded in 1924 and led by family members Guido, Silvia, and Giorgio Damiani, looked to eight classic works of art and reimagined them as jewelry. The result was equal parts exact replication and mind-blowing concept and execution.
The artwork ranges from Caravaggio’s Medusa, Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, Jeong Seon’s A Leisurely Cat in Autumn, Wassily Kandinsky’s Grey Form, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and Katsushika Hokusai’s, The Great Wave off Kanagawa shown here. Comprised of diamonds, blue sapphires, and Paraiba tourmalines to form the great swell, the formidable Mt. Fuji beyond the wave is depicted by a triangle-shaped diamond.
3. Dior
Since taking the helm of Dior Joaillerie in 1999, Victoire de Castellane has built a legacy of her own, creating its high jewelry and fine jewelry since 1999, and is known for her love of color saturated stones and bold floral motifs. This season, the Artistic Director infused her floral creations with anAbstract Expressionist energy with a playful Pop Art sensibility for the second part of “Diorissima”. The resulting creations unfold across a fantastical triptych of themes, from lush greenery to fluid, aquatic depths and mysterious, celestial constellations. To bring these wearable artworks to life, de Castellane utilizes graphic touches such as like squared petals and vibrant splashes of neon lacquer alongside the meticulous gemological “doublet” technique, which layers thin slices of stones to conjure a shifting, hyper-saturated depth of color.
4. Chaumet
Chaumet’s exploration of flora and fauna looked to the plants that excite our olfactory and gustatory senses. For “A Journey of Nature,” the 1780-founded Parisian maison gathered culinary flavors such as cinnamon, coffee beans, saffron, tea leaves, peppercorns, and vanilla and interpreted them in their natural state, drawing on archival designs for the house. Standouts include the vanilla plant in its various forms, such as flower, pod, and beans, marked by a 10-carat diamond center stone. Saffron is depicted with colorful enamel combined with a yellow diamond and white diamond pavé.
5. Cartier
The panther might be synonymous with Cartier, but rest assured, there is a menagerie of animals in their design vernacular. Offering press and collectors an exclusive preview during Haute Couture week, “Cartier Fauna” featured a beastiary of creatures, notably brought to life across a series of dramatic, theatrical cocktail rings. Among the sculptural highlights were a vibrantly plumed parrot, a whimsical fish whose open mouth cleverly loops around to form the ring’s band, and a rhinoceros carved from matte-gray titanium. A collar necklace featured a sculpted alligator head clasp set against a striking pattern of diamonds, vibrant green chrysoprase, deep rubies, and black spinel. Meanwhile, Cartier put a playful, contemporary spin on the classic toi-et-moi style, featuring contrasting animal duos in a face-off—including an unexpected tête-à-tête between a giraffe and a tiger.
6. Hermes
Hermès has also been for the horsey set. Though usually of the equestrian-slash-dressage and “courses hippique” kind. This season, director of fine jewelry Pierre Hardy looked to the ‘western’ side of sport for its “Into the Horsescape” presentation. Drawing inspiration from an 18th-century saddle Hermès had collected and housed in its museum, Hardy looked to another kind of horse enthusiast. “It’s a fantasy around this hero; it could be the cowboy of North America or the Vaquero of Mexico because this culture comes from there, but also the South American gaucho culture. It’s a global fantasy about freedom and the landscapes there,” he told Galeriemagazine.com. Thus, set among elaborate Adobe-inspired structures in vitrines, western styles such as bridles, saddles, and bits were fashioned into jaw-dropping jewelry styles.
7. Chanel
Coco Chanel created her eponymous brand with signifiers deeply personal to her. Case in point: her beloved perfect camelias, the lion and sun in reference to her astrological sign and month, and the comets and stars she witnessed at the abbey in Aubazine. Chanel’s latest high jewelry collection, “Signes and Symboles,” features these motifs in an 85-piece collection that demonstrates the depth of creativity of the maison’s jewelry atelier, even as the maison awaits its new high jewelry director, Marie-Laure Cérède, who joins in October. The collection is marked by an amulet-talisman motif as well, prominent in a series of rings each featuring a ruby, a sapphire, or an emerald, and a series of demonstrative necklaces, including a sapphire-accented diamond wonder containing all the symbols and plenty of lions imagined through precious gemstones.
8. Mellario
Mellerio, Place Vendôme’s oldest surviving jewelry house and led by 14th-generation family member Laure-Isabelle Mellerio, looked to its 20th-century legacy for a novel concept that is perfectly aligned with today’s fascination with nail art. In 1951, the brand filed a patent for decorative nail jewelry made from palladium and diamonds, which are rumored to have been used in Haute Couture shows for brands such as Balenciaga and Dior and also appeared in a magazine ad for the brand. Today’s new iterations come in gold with sapphires, emeralds, and rubies and can be bought one at a time and mixed and matched for the ultimate nail party.
9. Repossi
In contrast, Repossi, at 40 years in the famous jewelry plaza, may be the new kid on the block, but it has nonetheless made its mark. To commemorate this four-decade milestone, its “Serti sur Vide” collection pays homage to the Vendôme Column, originally erected by Napoleon, using a cluster of Indicolite tourmalines, green tourmalines, and aquamarines to mimic the oxidized bronze color of the famous landmark.