High jewellery becomes a collectors’ paradise as artisans raise the ceiling—from avant-garde pieces to interpretations of design icons.
The current craze for high jewellery—especially for the most rare and exceptional pieces—makes sense when you consider the inherent qualities of jewels. ‘Intrinsic value’ is a term aficionados often refer to when collecting high jewellery, and with prices of gold and gemstones soaring to record levels right now, not to mention the omnipresence of AI, hand-crafted artistry is more compelling than ever. No wonder high jewellery continues to go from strength to strength. In this climate, collectors continue to add to their existing collections with gusto, and in turn are becoming more discerning, their curations feeling more sophisticated and personal than ever—whether that’s honing in on a certain style or era, specific stones or a single designer.
The upshot is more ingenuity being served up by the elite brands this year, an ongoing show to which Robb Report has been lucky enough to have a front row seat. These range from daring, avant-garde creations emanating from fashion brands—often set with unusual and unexpected stones—to twists on design icons and classics from storied houses, who continue to infuse age-old, jewellery-making savoir-faire with new techniques and refined ideas, which often can take years to develop. High jewellery has never felt more exciting and full of promise.
Jewellery Piece of the Year: Boghossian Queen Indradevi Necklace
Interpreting a rich, storied past through a modern prism is surely the mission for any luxury house—but one that has particular resonance for the Geneva-based jeweller Boghossian. Founded more than 150 years ago, the brand is today looked after by its sixth generation: chief executive Albert Boghossian, his nephews Roberto and Ralph, and his children Dalia and Nicolas. Creations, meanwhile, are imagined by Albert Boghossian himself and the visionary, avant-garde designer Edmond Chin, who both marry the company’s fascinating artistic history with innovative Swiss craftsmanship.
That translates not only into jawdropping stones, but ones masterfully presented via innovative in-house Art of Inlay and Kissing techniques, which stack stonking stones atop each other in unexpected ways—and with serious pizazz. Perfectly fitting, then, that time, history and ancient cultures should all converge in Boghossian’s latest high jewellery collection. The 39 pieces in the new Queens of Time series pay homage to 11 historic and pioneering female figures—from Mayadevi (queen consort of South Asia’s Shakya kingdom during the 6th-century BC) to Joséphine de Beauharnais (French empress and first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte). Each suite’s discerning stone selection speaks to its muse’s power, influence and femininity.
Pictured here is an exquisite, sensual necklace of pear-shaped mint tourmalines, chrysoprase and aquamarines—coolly accented with diamond baguettes—that captures the legacy of Queen Indradevi, ruler of Cambodia’s Khmer Empire during the 12th century. And what a jewellery lover she was. According to historical evidence, Queen Indradevi dressed in cross-body jewels that flowed from an intricate collar extending down to her hips, alongside fragrant jasmine garlands, all topped with golden rings and a tiered crown. And now, here is a new suite that’s truly fit for a queen.
Best Ancient Stones: Glenn Spiro Materials of the Old World Collection Intaglio Necklace
Glenn Spiro has a special knack for sourcing rare and unusual stones—an attribute that helped the eponymous London jeweller first differentiate himself, and then cut his teeth, in the industry. With a unique focus on ultra-extraordinary stones, Spiro has cornered a very rarefied area of the market. That’s not to say his journey has been easy. “I am a first-generation jeweller and it’s really, really hard to be a first-generation jeweller,” he once told The Goldsmith’s Company, a British jewellery and silver institution dating back to medieval England. “There are only a handful of collectors in the world that buy works at our level and it’s very competitive. In order to get and keep their attention, we have to keep delivering jewels that surprise and excite.”
Spiro—who today works alongside his son Joe—has leaned into that idea with his Materials of the Old World Collection, featuring one-of-a-kind jewels themed around stones and artefacts rooted in ancient civilisations. This necklace is set with a rare collection of warm and translucent carnelian intaglios, while garnets and diamonds further augment the yesteryear nods. “We’ve always said the stones and materials come first,” Spiro tells Robb Report. “From there, it’s our job to take a risk.” Mission duly accomplished.
Best Design Icon: Ole Lynggaard Boho Collection Ring
Ole Lynggaard’s BoHo Collection chicly channels the natural bohemian style of second-generation Charlotte Lynggaard, today lead designer and creative director of the eponymous Danish jeweller. Rooted in carefully hand-selected, one-of-a-kind gemstones, the jewels exude a golden hue thanks to their textured 18k gold finish, topped with a dazzle of diamonds.
Charlotte’s BoHo collection goes from strength to strength with a set of four new double-stone rings and a matching pair of earrings. Each creation showcases her instinct for not only selecting individual gemstones but also pairing them in unexpected ways. Case in point: an eye-catching ring that juxtaposes a fiery, red coral with an amethyst of intense and deep colour, punctuated with 70 diamonds totalling 0.43 ct. Elsewhere, a highly saturated, sky-blue tourmaline sits alongside rutile quartz, the latter featuring a smattering of striations that—contrasted with punchy turquoise—will have you mesmerised.
By contrast, the design pictured here—featuring yellow tourmaline, smoky quartz and diamonds—may feel more muted and monochrome, but is still emotive in its own way. Such is the enigma of natural stones, and why Charlotte returns to them time and again.
Best Bestiary: Cartier Le Choeur Des Pierres Haryma Necklace
Cartier’s latest high jewellery series plays on the double meaning of the French word ‘choeur’, meaning ‘a chorus of voices’, but when written without the h, refers to the heart. This collection, hence, is an ode to the extraordinary gemstones the house is known for, but also the symphony of artisans and stone experts—including jewellers, lapidaries, gem-setters and polishers—behind each jewel’s creation.
Jacqueline Karachi-Langane, director of high jewellery creation at Cartier, believes each stone is an encounter, where “letting a stone speak is to recognise in it a memory of the world, a beauty shaped by time and imbued with eternity,” she says, adding that the jeweller’s task is ultimately to move others “to interpret and magnify the stone’s unique soul, its presence”.
And that’s the case for this exceptional, golden-hued necklace, celebrating the house’s panther mascot, which inches its way down a staircase of five imperial topazes weighing a total of 28.04 carats, and further dangling with garnets and white, yellow and orange diamonds. The big cat, meanwhile, lends its piebald coat to a pixelated-like chain—rendered from custom-cut onyx—that adds a modern flourish and sensual fluidity to the design.
Best Brooch: Chopard Miracles Red Carpet Collection
The Cannes Film Festival in May is always a glamorous moment for high jewellery, with the house of Chopard invariably dominating headlines over the 12-day affair. This is unsurprising, given that the Geneva-based maison has had a presence at the emblematic movie jamboree for just shy of 30 years, not only crafting the Palme d’Or trophy in ethical gold and dressing members of the jury in its dazzling creations, but also hosting the annual Chopard Trophy that celebrates up-and-coming acting talent.
This year’s Miracles Red Carpet Collection is themed around life’s mysteries and wonders, and features all the signature design touchpoints of Chopard artistic director Caroline Scheufele: bold use of colour, tributes to flora and fauna, ultra-lightweight titanium that’s coloured for extra chromatic wow, and a dash of fantasy and escape.
This dazzling carp brooch, set in white gold and titanium, encapsulates the collection’s mood. Its nod to the beloved Eastern motif comes to life through a mix of pear shaped and brilliant cut diamonds, coupled with brilliant sapphires—and is a real head-turner that will look fabulous on any man or woman gracing VIP walkways this year.
Best Chromatic: David Morris Legacy of Colour Volume II
In the nascent days of David Morris, the family-run Bond Street jeweller specialised in the ‘big four’ gemstones—diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires—as any major jeweller conservatively would. Now, however, with three generations under its belt, David Morris has become renowned for ultra-rare, boldly coloured gemstones that have been all the rage in recent years (fact: second-generation Jeremy Morris has an enviable stash of paraíba tourmalines and conch pearls, quietly amassed over decades). Today, the house signature bursts with an energy and verve from such standout stones, its electric blues, vivid greens and daring colour combinations notably forward thinking and daring in vision.
Playing on this chromatic expertise, David Morris’s Legacy of Colour high jewellery collection welcomes Volume II. Twelve new creations join the lineup, from the statement-making, diamond and emerald earring and necklace Kalamos suites, to an astonishing diamond necklace dangling with a huge 184.15 ct unheated Sri Lankan sapphire, the largest sapphire in Morris’s history. The earrings too are especially sublime: the Samsara pieces brandish white diamonds, fancy orange yellow diamonds, and fancy pink diamonds in 18 ct white, yellow and rose gold.
Best Nature Piece: Cindy Chao Feather Brooch
Cindy Chao calls nature ‘my ultimate muse’, and while flora and fauna may be two of jewellery’s most time-honoured motifs, leave it to the Taiwanese jeweller to bring a unique sense of time to her creations. Chao captures nature at its most ephemeral and fragile: a dewdrop teetering on an edge, a butterfly just taking flight, a floral brooch that looks almost coquettish in a light breeze. Chao’s masterful execution is the byproduct of a unique confluence—her sculptor father and architect grandfather—a lineage which gives the artist’s work a signature, three-dimensional quality, fusing Eastern and Western design sensibilities.
This Feather Brooch speaks of a jeweller at the height of her powers. The feather is clearly in motion—perhaps falling to the ground, or swept up in a gust of wind—with its inherent sense of movement created through a highly complex, 180-degree twist structure, an impressive technical achievement that took nearly two years to develop.
The stones—3,693 gemstones for 78.51 ct in total—come together in an almost painterly palette: 12 distinct shades of blue sapphires at the feather’s base flow into vivid green tsavorites, grey-blue and grey-green sapphires, and yellow diamonds. Meanwhile, the feather’s tip is sculpted from 80 cushion cut colourless diamonds, and topped with a 3.24 ct marquise fancy intense yellow diamond. As if this sprinkle of gemstones didn’t offer enough contour, contrast, light and shadow, the entire gem is also set in anodised titanium, which subtly glows with a verdant hue.
Painstaking craft and construction are at the heart of Chao’s work; she only makes 10 examples a year for her ultra-high-end Black Label Masterpieces line. It’s no wonder that the Smithsonian, Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Victoria and Albert Museum have all acquired portions of her oeuvre, or that she has been awarded France’s prestigious Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, as collectors the world over—from Thai royalty and Middle Eastern sheiks, to Asian tycoons and young tech entrepreneurs— join a growing waitlist for her work.
Best Earrings: Tiffany & Co. Blue Book 2026: Hidden Garden Twin Bud Earrings
Tiffany & Co. embraces the time-honoured jewellery theme of nature, once more imagined through the lens of the house’s legendary designer Jean Schlumberger. The latest instalment of its Blue Book high jewellery collection is titled Hidden Garden, a series that expresses flora and fauna through concepts of transformation and renewal.
Channelling the mood is the headline Butterfly suite, a line of jewels that pay homage to a recurring motif for the house, in which unenhanced padparadscha and Montana sapphires merge in a stirring chromatic pairing of delicate pink-orange and denim-blue, evoking the fragile, ephemeral beauty of butterfly wings—underscoring the New York jeweller’s growing confidence with unexpected gemstones and standout colour combinations.
Nature’s fleeting moments are also captured in Twin Bud, which reinterprets another Schlumberger archival theme, imagined here in twisted, intersecting platinum vines, accented with polished yellow gold tips for added texture, dimension and a truly modern touch. Fully articulated, crisscrossing shoots dangle in tandem with a pair of verdant emerald buds—two unenhanced, perfectly matched Zambian pear-shaped beauties—that are further set alight with diamonds.
Best Revival: Boucheron Untamed necklace
Frédéric Boucheron opened the first jewellery shop on Paris’s Place Vendôme 133 years ago, during the peak of the Beaux-Arts era. In a tribute to his genius, creative director Claire Choisne created four high-jewellery masterpieces honouring his legacy. The most seductive is a spectacular piece called the Untamed, which embodies the jeweller’s sensibilities in an 18 k white-gold strand of ivy with diamond leaves interspersed with tiny rock-crystal dew droplets.
The original was never created, so producing it proved a technical challenge—2,600 hours of work were required to figure out the construction. Each tiny stem and leaf was mounted one by one, by hand, trailing dramatically down the body. The piece can be worn in various ways; in its full form; as a long or short question mark; as a collar necklace, a brooch or a hair jewel. Either way, Monsieur Boucheron would no doubt be pleased.
Best Transformable: Graff Butterfly Brooches
The Bond Street jeweller’s latest creations tap into various high jewellery trends right now: namely, nature and multi-wear designs. Graff’s new set of 12 high jewellery brooches pay homage to the butterfly, a creature which first fluttered into the house 50 years ago and, in this instance, is designed around a fastener conceived in the 17th century: the fine jabot pin.
Able to be worn as a unisex brooch or pendant, the butterfly rests ‘en tremblant’ atop the pin: this is no easy feat for Graff’s master jewellers and artisans, since each of the 12 jewels offers a different silhouette and interpretation on the insect. Art and architecture are echoed reverentially, as evidenced by the Eva brooch, its dégradé of sapphires, emeralds, tourmalines and diamonds evoking Monet’s garden. The pavé diamond Tamara, meanwhile, nods to the Art Deco movement, featuring an explosion of baguette cut and round diamonds, and topped with a marquise emerald. An age-old symbol of renewal, optimism and self-evolution, Graff’s butterfly has never looked so dazzling.
Best Avante-Garde Piece: Louis Vuitton Mythica High Jewellery Conquest Ring
Louis Vuitton’s high jewellery collection this year is themed around a heroine’s epic personal journey. Set over 11 chapters and 110 pieces, the collection is rooted in Louis Vuitton design codes and delightful, unexpected gemstones—think zircons, fluorescent diamonds and cat’s eye topaz—while embracing all the elements of a modern myth.
Conquest channels the motif of an arrow, a design code increasingly seen in Louis Vuitton high jewellery. The suite is headlined by an avantgarde necklace lined with 21 vivid rubies totalling 21.86 ct, and paired with baguette diamonds, as individual arrows are outlined in onyx for added graphic effect and wow factor. Bracelets, brooches, earrings and rings join the party, like this cool, edgy dazzler that pairs a signature LV Monogram Star cut yellow diamond with custom-cut stones.
