This year the high jewellery collections from the world’s leading houses underlined just how imaginative, innovative, and avant-garde their artisans can be. Here are a few pieces that stood out for Emirates Woman.

BVLGARI—ECLETTIC
A In Living Colour

As is customary, Bvlgari once again tells its story through vibrant and vivid gemstones. This new Serpenti high jewelry necklace makes that case with particular conviction—60.60 carats of mandarin garnets move alongside pink tourmalines and juicy rubellites and are anchored beautifully by emerald beads and delicate turquoise inlays that give a cool counterpoint to its pink gold framework. But what distinguishes this piece is not the carat count. It is the rhythm. Color here functions as architecture—each stone a note in something that reads less like jewelry and more like a score. Worn, it follows the body with the kind of fluid, continuous movement that makes you forget, briefly, that it is not alive.

TIFFANY & CO. – HIDDEN GARDEN
Deep Roots

Tiffany & Co.’s Hidden Garden collection is both a meditation on the work of famed designer Jean Schlumberger and a love letter to the power of transformation. This Bird on a Rock necklace, in particular, is one of the house’s most viscerally joyful arguments for embracing the Schlumberger style and its playful point of view. Anchoring the design is a cushion-cut Santa Maria aquamarine from Brazil weighing 22.60 carats. It has pride of place on the necklace and sits there with the cool, unhurried confidence of something that knows exactly what it is. Around the stone, custom-cut chrysoprase beads pool in vivid green, while round rubies and diamonds animate the composition like light catching water. That the aquamarine converts into a brooch feels almost beside the point. Almost.

CHAUMET – ENVOL
Spread Your Wings

Wings and the act of taking flight were the leaping-off points for Chaumet’s Envol high jewelry collection. In a lineup of striking pieces, it’s the pendant suspended from a sapphire-and-pearl sautoir that stands out. Because, as much as it looks as if it is about to soar away, it’s the secret it hides behind its grand feu blue dégradé enamel and diamond wings that is designed to pique interest. Slide its center open to reveal a sodalite watch face within. A jewel that tells time only to those it trusts. Chaumet’s 250 years of ornithological obsession are beautifully distilled into a single, swiveling, secret-keeping gesture. It’s a design that will send quite a few hearts aflutter.

CARTIER – LE CHŒUR DES PIERRES
Craft in Abundance

It’s been over a hundred years since Jacques Cartier returned from India with an entirely different understanding of what color could do to elevate high jewellry. The Maison revisits that inheritance with its new Le Chœur des Pierres collection. One of the highlights of which is the new Tutti Kanya necklace, which features a 30.33-carat engraved Zambian emerald. It anchors a necklace dense with carved rubies, sapphires, and emeralds arranged into flowers, leaves, and berries; a ruby tassel at the nape provides structural counterpoint to the abundant front composition. What made Tutti Frutti radical in the 1920s was never the excess of the design, but rather the discipline underneath it. That tension, between opulence and order, between Mughal abundance and Cartier precision, remains entirely intact in this extraordinary masterpiece.

CHOPARD – MIRACLES RED CARPET COLLECTION
A River Runs Through

There are certain things that high jewelry lovers can always set their watches by. One of them is that Chopard will unveil a new high jewelry collection just in time for the Cannes Film Festival, which it has been wedded to since 1998. This year the house had quite a few showstopping designs appear on the red-carpeted steps of the Croisette; of particular note is its Invitation to Wonder necklace that features an 88.37-carat royal blue sapphire at its center. 506 hours in the making, the necklace, with its framing oval aquamarines and diamonds that look like rivulets of rushing water, is a celebration of artisanal craftsmanship at its finest.

DE BEERS LONDON – VIBRATIONS
A Higher Frequency

De Beers London doesn’t really do things quietly. Case in point: the Echo Necklace—centerpiece of the new Vibrations High Jewellry collection. It is home to a 1.12-carat Fancy Intense Blue diamond sourced from Namibia, a stone so rare it practically has its own atmosphere. Around it, over 193 carats of round and custom baguette-cut white diamonds, each shaped using the taille sur œuvre technique, which means the forms of the stones are created directly on the gold framework. Then comes the engineering coup: this single necklace transforms into six distinct jewels—including a tiara, bracelet, and earrings. The piece, which was inspired by the rippling waters of Southern Namibia’s Fish River Canyon, has been executed with the kind of audacity that is a tangible reminder of why high jewelry still matters.

GRAFF – EXCEPTIONAL PIECES
Put Up Your Cuffs

Graff has always understood that restraint and excess are not diametric opposites—they are negotiating partners. The proof in its latest offering is a high jewelry cuff anchored by a rare 18-carat cushion-cut fancy intense yellow diamond that looks as if it is hovering above a landscape of 835 snow-set pavé stones totaling 126 carats. The surface reads as pure, almost impossible levitation—each diamond appearing to float freely, no armature in sight. No surprise here that hundreds of hours went into concealing the armature beneath every stone. This was done via an intricate framework engineered to make the extraordinary look effortless. This is Graff doing what it does so well, making statement jewelry that gets all the right sort of attention.

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