Inside The Most Extraordinary High Jewelry Creations at Couture Week in Paris
The biggest diamond debuts, boldest new collections, and standout creations from the world’s best jewelers during 2026 Paris Couture Week.
Nikos Koulis Debuts the 77 Collection During Paris Couture Week. (Courtesy of Nikos Koulis)
If it’s July in Paris, the fashion set is making the rounds at couture week—but jewelry lovers know the magic happens behind the guarded doors of Place Vendôme. What began in 1945 as an intimate showcase for couture houses presenting their collections to VIP clients has become one of the most anticipated moments on the jewelry calendar, where the world’s best maisons and designers unveil their most ambitious creations.
Despite the oppressive heat, I raced between more than 25 jewelry appointments in just three days. Heritage houses and independent designers alike pushed the boundaries of what high jewelry can be, balancing craftsmanship with fearless imagination. Boucheron’s Claire Choisne once again proved why her presentations are couture week’s most anticipated, while several other houses introduced new concepts that challenged convention.
Meet the Expert
- Jill Newman is a jewelry authority, editor, and storyteller with over 25 years of experience, having reported from diamond mines in Africa, cutting workshops in India and Belgium, and ateliers around the world.
- She serves as Editor-at-Large for the Natural Diamond Council, with additional bylines in The New York Times, Town & Country, Elle Décor, and Robb Report.
One unforgettable example? Nikos Koulis paired cellulose acetate tortoiseshell and diamonds, making one of the season’s attention-grabbing statements!
The defining themes this season were innovation, transformability, and unapologetic scale. Necklaces became sculptures, brooches morphed into pendants, and earrings detached into multiple styles. This year’s presentations prove that exceptional diamonds and gemstones are far more than investments; they are expressive, glamorous, and wildly creative—sometimes with surprising wit. Here are the highlights.
Messika Showcases the Okavango Blue Diamond During Paris Couture Week
Messika delivered one of the biggest moments of the week with Le Okavango Blue, showcasing the ultra-rare 20.46-carat blue diamond—the largest and rarest blue diamond ever discovered in Botswana—set on a rivière necklace of more than 500 diamonds. Considering the recent auction prices for fancy colored diamonds, this is likely a great addition to any investment portfolio.
Valérie Messika presented the necklace alongside Terres de Contrastes, a collection that translates Botswana’s deserts, topography, and lush Okavango Delta into bold high jewelry rich in color, texture, movement, and the spirit of the country.
Chanel Debuts the Signes & Symboles Collection During Paris Couture Week
The buzz around Chanel is impossible to ignore. With Matthieu Blazy as the house’s new creative director and Marie-Laure Cérède arriving from Cartier to head jewelry creation next year, the house is starting an exciting new chapter.
It’s new Signes & Symboles jewelry collection celebrates Chanel’s enduring and very personal codes—the lion, star, sun, and camellia—with 85 high jewelry pieces that feel modern, whimsical, and an instant status symbol. Diamond-covered collars and bracelets are adorned with signature charms, while colorful hardstone rings and earrings deliver fresh colors to the house’s iconic motifs.
Buccellati Unveils the Serenissima Collection During Paris Couture Week
Many jewelry fans (me included) have a love affair with Buccellati’s exquisitely crafted pieces that show off old-world craftsmanship in dreamy pieces that become instant heirlooms. They are at once delicate and refined yet regal and a stylish status symbol. The new Serenissima collection is everything devotees love: finely engraved gold, open work, and diamonds that shimmer without overpowering.
Inspired by Venetian lace, the collection transforms Renaissance goldsmithing techniques into large-scale, stylish jewels. A standout cuff, set with nearly 14 carats of rose-cut diamonds, appears remarkably light despite its scale.
Boucheron Launches the Human Being Carte Blanche Collection During Paris Couture Week
Claire Choisne remains jewelry’s greatest provocateur. Each year, editors crowd into Boucheron’s Place Vendôme upstairs rooms to see how she transformed her dreams into precious reality. This season’s Carte Blanche collection, named Human Being, is meant to express the similarities and differences that connect us.
She expressed this through five unique craftsmanship techniques executed in the same silhouettes. A monumental necklace with over 1,500 carats of morganites, paved with diamonds, required around 3,200 hours to create. Flower features micro miniature floral paintings on pink quartz with lacquer and diamonds, and Tattoo, inspired by Victorian-era tattoos, is created with more than 580 carats of hand-etched smoky quartz. These maximalist designs blur the lines between jewelry, sculpture, and contemporary art.
Chaumet Stays Regal With A Journey Through Nature Collection During Paris Couture Week
Nature has always been Chaumet’s greatest muse, and A Journey Through Nature continues that narrative with extraordinary gemstones and diamonds in poetic designs. On a walk through the house’s impossibly grand and layered 18th-century historic building on Place Vendôme, it’s easy to feel like you’ve stepped back in time.
Exquisitely created jewelry portrays old-world craftsmanship in timeless designs. In a nod to the house’s heritage as jeweler to the French court, there’s always a tiara in the collection, but redesigned through a contemporary lens. The new diamond Peppercorn tiara feels less like fantasy than the ultimate statement necklace—regal, feminine, and effortlessly chic.
De Beers Embraced Warm Diamonds During Paris Couture Week
When De Beers introduced its Talisman collection more than two decades ago, it broke new ground as the first brand to feature rough, tumbled diamonds in warm shades of brown, yellow, and champagne in important designs. Today, that organic style is a standard.
But nobody does quite like De Beers, who showed four new high jewelry creations juxtaposing rough and polished diamonds in bold, sculptural gold settings. The standout cuff featured nearly 11 carats of rough and polished diamonds surrounding a one-carat center stone, celebrating the beauty of diamonds in their natural form.
Mikimoto Unveils the L’Éclat Collection During Paris Couture Week
Mikimoto proves pearls are anything but predictable. L’Éclat, a 60-piece high jewelry collection, explores the transformative power of light through sculptural shapes, celestial motifs, and dramatic scale. A showstopper was an oversized meteor-inspired brooch, with a luminous aquamarine center and cascading diamonds that draped over the shoulder. It’s glamorous, gender-fluid, and destined for the red carpet.
Nikos Koulis Debuts the 77 Collection During Paris Couture Week
Nikos Koulis has never been afraid to challenge convention. He did just that with 77, unveiled at his new Paris boutique. The designs paired white diamonds with luminous tortoiseshell-patterned cellulose acetate, creating an elegant tension between precious and unexpected materials.
Named for the designer’s birth year, the lightweight yet durable tortoiseshell allows for volume without weight and is a renewable, plant-based material. Alongside extraordinary diamond rings and sautoirs, like the Whisper Necklace with over 100 carats that seems to flow like water with white rock crystal, it was one of the week’s most talked-about debuts.
Pomellato Reveals the Byzantine Necklace During Paris Couture Week
The Italian house is best known for its bold use of colored gemstones, but this season diamonds also took center stage. The spectacular Byzantine necklace layers 13 carats of white, brown, and grey diamonds into a sculptural collar. Set with more than 2,000 diamonds, it illustrates Pomellato’s mastery of technique.
Not to be missed, the house showed an array of rare colored gems, including a choker with 21 pear-shaped Paraiba tourmaline drops, weighing more than 20 carats, alongside several colorful designs defined by elegant movement and a sense of fluidity.
David Morris Releases the Legacy of Color Collection During Paris Couture Week
The London jeweler brought out its serious jewels. The showstopper was a dreamy 184-carat unheated Sri Lankan sapphire on a necklace with nearly 50 carats of diamonds, alongside large-scale, vivid Paraiba tourmaline rings. Pink diamonds, a long-time signature of David Morris, took center stage in the new Legacy of Color collection.
The Artemis necklace, inspired by the Greek goddess and her silver bow, features a graceful, alternating V-shaped motif set with more than 50 carats of white diamonds and accented with a river of vivid fancy pink diamonds. It’s a masterclass in balancing important stones in distinctly feminine, artistic style.
Graff‘s Butterfly Takes Flight During Paris Couture Week
Graff is famous for its jaw-dropping diamonds, but this season, it was the artistry around them that really stole the show. The house unveiled 12 unique butterfly brooches, which transform into pendants, exemplifying its savoir-faire and technical mastery. A longtime signature of Graff, the butterfly silhouette, formed with pear and marquise-cut diamonds, is a poetic and contemporary jewel.
Hermès Launches the Horsescape Collection During Paris Couture Week
Pierre Hardy’s latest high jewelry collection for Hermès, Horsescape, distills the house’s equestrian heritage into sleek, architectural forms, dripping with diamonds. Unveiled in an immersive installation at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the 90-piece collection transforms stirrups, bits, bridles, and reins into sculptural jewels that are bold in scale, many with a sense of wit, such as the diamond pavé cowboy hats and boots.
In one series, made in a warm palette of rose gold, brown diamonds, pale coral, pink opal, agate, and tiger’s eye, conveys a quietly luxurious mood. Other designs show the house’s opulent side, with outsized diamond cuffs and a diamond bib necklace.
Van Cleef & Arpels Embraced the Fascination of Egypt During Paris Couture Week
Van Cleef & Arpels looked to the grandeur of ancient civilization for Fascinating Egypt, a collection unveiled in June that continues to evolve with new pieces. Rich in symbolism, vivid color, and bold geometry, the jewels portray architecture, Egyptian mythology, and landscape in both literal and figurative designs.
Known for bringing history and fairytales to life through symbolic and poetic pieces, the house takes the concept event further this time. One example is the Silhouette Précieuse clip and pendant, which resembles the profile of an Egyptian royal, set with coral, lapis lazuli, and diamonds. A pair of emerald earrings is set with diamonds in a graphic design that echoes the ancient civilization.
Vhernier Releases Vhernier Creations During Paris Couture Week
Italian jeweler Vhernier continues to prove that restraint can be every bit as powerful as extravagance. Freccia builds an entire high jewelry collection around its signature triangular form, softened into sculptural volumes in mirror-polished finish, diamonds, and its proprietary Trasparenze technique, which layers gemstones beneath rock crystal to create depth and luminous color. Pure, modern, and distinctly Italian.
Viltier Debuts New Creations at Paris Couture Week For the First Time
Showing at Le Bristol hotel, Viltier proved why it’s one of Paris’s most exciting young jewelry houses. Graphic, architectural, and bold, the collection pairs chunky gold volumes with shimmering pavé diamonds. A standout piece was the Edge Pyramid Pavé ring, which frames a violet-blue tanzanite with diamond-set vertical gold bars, while a sculptural gold and diamond cuff is strong yet refined. Large-scale without feeling heavy, these jewels deliver the kind of high impact people crave without overpowering.
