All That Glitters: Paris Winter 2022

This year’s collections at Paris Haute Couture Week pushed boundaries, mined archives and paid homage to nature’s bounty.

January Couture week in Paris is one of the most highly anticipated jewelry events of the year, when iconic and famous brands in the industry introduce loyal buyers and admirers to their newest high jewelry pieces and collections. Centered around the historic Place Vendôme, where the pieces are sketched, designed and refined, the intimate group of designers on show paid homage to their houses’ history by creating various jewelry suites featuring gemstones of the highest quality. Inspired by nature, human emotion and their various in-house design specialties, the collections below push the boundaries of high jewelry creation, achieving sculptural works of art, complex in practice yet effortless in aesthetic.

The Déferlante collection by Chaumet
One of the oldest residents of Place Vendôme, Maison Chaumet has looked to one of its most beloved sources of inspiration to create a collection with a distinct aesthetic that has not been seen in-house before. Water, one of the brand’s greatest creative motivators for over two centuries, is taken to a new level in the Déferlante collection, capturing the shape, motion and colors of water in the form of breaking waves.

Déferlante’s eight pieces give life to a new, powerful and complex aesthetic for the maison. Full of vivacious energy with sprays of pear-shaped diamonds and curved white gold lines, the suite continues to honor Chaumet’s famous design elegance captured from a brilliantly new perspective. The zenith of the collection comes in the form of a jewelry piece that is most emblematic to the maison – the tiara. Conveyed through fascinating realism, the Déferlante tiara portrays rising waves as they crash onto the shore through 1,600 carats of brilliant-cut and step-cut diamonds.

New Maharajahs by Boucheron
Boucheron’s New Maharajahs collection marries the brand’s impressive history with its creative director Claire Choisne’s love of art deco. The story of Sir Bhupinder Singh, the Maharajah of Patiala, and his epic Boucheron high jewelry custom order in the 1920s is famous among those who work on Place Vendôme – and it’s still the largest Place Vendôme commissioned piece to date. For the New Maharajah’s collection, Choisne has created 14 high jewelry pieces inspired by this commission, which was originally composed of 25 suites of 149 different designs made from mountains of gems that the Maharaja himself transported to Paris in trunks.

Stripping all color from the collection other than vibrant green emeralds, each piece has an updated 21st-century aesthetic, ornate yet fluid and made to be worn by either a man or a woman. A highlight of the collection is an objet d’art – a wooden sewing bobbin made with mother of pearl marquetry and goat suede leather that acts as a holder for 10 New Churiyans bracelets. Considered tokens of protection worn by women on their wedding day, Choisne’s take on these bracelets in pearls, white gold, diamonds and mother of pearl can be stacked along the inner column of the bobbin, creating not only wearable works of art but also a visual art piece to display in one’s home.

Exceptional Stones by Chopard
Chopard’s Caroline Scheufele presented a selection of one-of-a-kind loose and set colored gemstones. From rings featuring a 4.10-carat, fancy-intense-blue diamond and a 10.88-carat,  fancy-intense-pink diamond, to a standalone 31.31-carat Chameleon diamond, this collection is a paradise of exquisite and unprecedented gems, each one acting as a tribute to nature – a perpetual source of inspiration for the brand.

Included among this treasure trove of precious stones was the record-breaking Chopard Insofu Emerald. It’s named after the word for ‘elephant’ in the Bemba language, which is spoken by the people living near the Kagem mine in the Kafubu region of Zambia where the emerald was found. The 6,225-carat rough emerald was responsibly mined and it is expected to give an impressive number of cut stones of the highest quality with a clear, traceable history. Chopard’s skilled craftsmen will create a collection of high-jewelry pieces from the yield that will come from this single rough stone. 

2022 Black Label Masterpiece by Cindy Chao
In an intimate and elegant presentation at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, jewelry artist Cindy Chao showcased a select few of her mesmerizing creations. Known for her masterful manipulation of titanium, each of the seven pieces she unveiled at Couture Week feature the designer’s signature motifs and colors of flora in new and unexpected forms, pushing the boundaries of innovation even further than what she is famous for.

The dew-dipped Coral earrings from her 15th Anniversary Collection display her craftsmanship skills at their very best. Tough titanium is sculpted into a soft form resembling ocean coral and is set with a pear-shaped fancy-brown-orange diamond and a pear-shaped blue sapphire, both set in contrasting light-activated resin, creating a visual tension and pleasing asymmetry. 

The Alchemist of Light by De Beers
De Beers brings style innovation to its high-jewelry aesthetic in its latest collection, The Alchemist of Light. Inspired by the magic of light and how it affects the world around us, the unveiling showcased the first two jewelry suites of the collection. Marked by bold and assertive shapes, the two suites completely contrast in color schemes.

The Atomique set is in a uniform tone of white diamonds and white gold. In its standout piece, the Atomique collar necklace, diamonds are set into their atomic structural shape. Its molecular geometric patterns, bold lines and bombé profile bends with the neckline becoming one with the wearer allowing space for the skin to glow beneath the jewelry. The second suite, the Light Rays set, is composed of warm color tones as a visual interpretation of sunlight radiating over mountaintops or from behind dark clouds. Brown, orange and yellow diamonds are set into titanium for the first time in the brand’s history.

Sixième Sens by Cartier
During the couture presentations, Cartier exhibited additional pieces to its already existing Sixième Sens par Cartier collection. Full of graphic trompe l’oeil patterns that create optical illusions, these new additions bring a welcome injection of that infamous “sixth sense” of emotion to the collection.

Playing with gravity and composition, each piece features a series of intricate gemstones positioned purposefully to create volume in a supple form, beautifully disrupting our perception of shapes and boundaries. The Bérénice necklace brings the beloved shoulder jewelry from the 1920s back to center stage. Designed with the human body in mind, this piece made from diamonds, black lacquer and a cabochon-cut, 16.43-carat emerald drapes naturally onto the skin to create distorted shapes and curves, creating intrigue in all admirers.

Galons Dior by Dior
This high jewelry collection of 81 pieces celebrates a new design chapter in the history of Dior Joaillerie. Artistic director Victoire de Castellane has left her beloved literal floral creations behind in her new collection, Galons Dior. Instead, she pulls inspiration from Dior’s historic fashion design archives, reimagining and reinterpreting the famous decorative ribbons and chains that have been used in previous collections.

Studded with the familiar precious stones we have seen in the past, de Castellane intertwines these colorful gems with strings of woven gold, creating light and feminine pieces that mimic the shape of floating fabric, alluding to the golden trimmings that Mr Dior adorned his couture creations with. The Galons Dior necklace, featuring pink and white gold, diamonds and a pink spinel, swirls around the neckline with supreme elegance creating playful and supple diamond curves that evoke the spirited femininity associated with the designer.

Impressions by David Morris
David Morris’s latest high jewelry collection, Impressions, combines its famous in-house classic natural motifs with a newfound modernist influence to create pieces with a distinct artistic perspective. Taking classic shapes and reinventing them by setting gemstones into unexpected and modern settings, this collection is full of impressive one-of-a-kind gemstones that are set in complex yet minimalistic structures to create visually intriguing pieces.

The Eternal Flame necklace is the embodiment of this classic-meets-contemporary theme. In a thought-provoking nod to Victorian cameo brooches and necklaces, the design features a captivating black opal at the center of its pendant rather than the traditional carved profile of a woman. The flickering colors within the opal are highlighted by Paraiba tourmalines and white diamonds, staple gemstones of the house.

Fawaz Gruosi
Officially launched in 2020 with the opening of his Berkeley Square store in London, Fawaz Gruosi created his eponymous brand with a dedication to maintaining his unmistakably recognizable design aesthetic. His latest creations shown during Paris Couture Week are the result of a year of self-reflection, in an attempt to think up new creative paths to transport high jewelry into another dimension.

Forgoing all limits and compromise, Fawaz Gruosi’s high jewelry collection is an ode to emotions: “I want to create jewelry that is as emotional for the wearer as it is for the viewer.” Inspired by his most vivid dreams, each piece flirts with the sensuality of baroque design, surrealist color combinations and extravagant gemstones to create pieces that exude feminine power. His snake-like, 18-karat rose gold ring set with 52 baguette-cut unheated Burma rubies and 567 brilliant-cut rubies wraps itself sensually around the finger, becoming one with the wearer and tantalizing the onlooker.

Main image: Boucheron Padma Nacre asymmetrical earrings set with two pear diamonds, paved with diamonds and mother-of-pearl, with cultured pearls, in white gold.