The most spectacular high jewellery at Couture Week 2025
Diamond-studded rosebuds, bamboo groves festooned with gemstones, brilliant birds and gleaming big cats all loomed large at this season’s Paris’ Couture Week presentations. The first of the biannual events, which showcase the very finest in high jewellery craftsmanship in the City of Lights, emerged as a sparkling tribute to the wonders of nature, with the storied houses surrounding Place Vendôme each unveiling collections of gem-encrusted flora and fauna.
At Cartier, the final chapter of its Nature Sauvage high jewellery collection was replete with several fantastic beasts, including a earrings featuring dazzling crocodiles, a suite of golden striped tigers (complete with moveable diamond paws), a collier necklace dedicated to the graphic spines of a sea urchin and even an eye-catching cocktail ring that showcased a gleaming array of rosy-hued stones arranged like the tentacles of an octopus.
Elsewhere, the house of Boucheron delved back into its archives and produced an entire meadow’s worth of monochromatic wildflowers and plants (plus the occasional beetle or bug), all inspired by the botanical drawings of founder Frederic Boucheron and entirely crafted from white gold, diamonds, rock crystal and mother-of-pearl. Chaumet, too, had crop of extraordinary jewels, this time a capsule collection of pieces dedicated to the graphic lines and leaves of a bamboo grove – a teaser, apparently, of more growth to follow later this summer. At Graff, it was all about the birds, with a single standout necklace featuring a pair of diamond sparrows in flight. A humble subject, perhaps, but no less worth of spectacular celebration than an exotic tiger or a prowling panther.
Here, we round up the most remarkable jewels worth dreaming about right now.
Cartier
The final chapter of Cartier’s ‘Nature Sauvage’ collection is certainly closing with a bang. Or rather, a roar, as a pride of big cats take centre stage in this collection dedicated to the beauty of the wilderness. Amongst earrings and brooches with brown diamond tigers and diamond-studded panthers climbing branches of baguette-cut emeralds, one necklace captured the essence of the whole collection – a magnificent white gold collier depicting a canopy of geometric-looking palm leaves supporting a sculptural diamond leopard.
This fabulous feline, more than any other, has come to represent Cartier over the last century, thanks to the maison’s trailblazing creative director from the 1930s and 40s, Jeanne Toussaint, who went by the nickname ‘La Panthère and claimed the emblem as her own. Here, the lithe onyx-spotted creature guards an imposing 26.53-carat polished Ceylon sapphire, perhaps a throwback to a renowned piece Toussaint designed for the Duchess of Windsor in 1949 – a brooch with a three-dimensional diamond panther perched atop a huge 152.35-carat sapphire cabochon, which the Duchess liked to wear on her shoulder.
Dior
Each year, Dior’s creative director of jewellery, Victoire de Castellane, deftly combines themes derived from Christian Dior’s famed atelier (fabric swatches, ribbons, silky textures, motifs such as toile de jouy) with the couturier’s beloved flowers and animals to create dazzling pieces of wearable art. This season, Castellane has conjured ‘Milly Dentelle’, a collection of 76 jewels devoted to the designer’s use of lace, expressed as a bouquet of floral pieces. Taking her cue from Dior’s home and gardens in Milly-la-Forêt in northern France, de Castellane has woven precious metal into guipure-like lattices, which bloom with pearly daisies, diamond blossoms and glistening sapphire roses. A fitting tribute to the iconic designer who once claimed that “after women, flowers are the most lovely thing that God has given the world.”
Boucheron
Boucheron’s exquisite new high jewellery collection, Untamed Nature, draws inspiration from the beauty of the botanical world – specifically, from the humble meadow flowers and plants encountered (and admired) by the maison’s founder, Frederic Boucheron, in the French countryside in the late 1800s. “Looking at Frederic Boucheron’s work, it’s obvious that he took time to really observe plants and insects because his jewellery designs are so realistic,” says the house’s creative director, Claire Choisne. “He didn’t try to romanticise nature, he copied it, down to its twisted leaves and wilted flowers, which he replicated in diamonds. I wanted to remain true to that.”
Cue a garden of contemporary white gold and diamond herbs and flowers that took Choisne and her team three years to cultivate, including a complex ‘Carrot Flower’ pin boasting hundreds of diamond blossoms, each set and angled in several different directions; a realistic moth brooch using intricate marquetry of grey and white mother-of-pearl to imitate the velvety-looking texture of its wings, and a necklace resembling the curved offshoot of a wild rose bush, featuring three diamond buds (weighing roughly eight, four and two carats) nestled amongst foliage crafted with the ancient lost wax technique – a feat that took 2,300 hours of work in all.
Chaumet
“A tribute to Asia” is how Chaumet describes its latest capsule collection of 10 high jewellery pieces, Bamboo. Rather than being a figurative ode to the plant, each stylised jewel is lent an entirely contemporary impact thanks to the graphic lines and leafy patterns observed in a bamboo grove, which gives the whole collection an almost architectural feel. Highlights include a glistening white gold tiara, adorned with brilliant-cut diamonds and tipped with hand-engraved rose gold bamboo leaves, as well as a show-stopping bib necklace of gold and platinum ‘bamboo stalks’, embellished with a dazzling black opal cabochon weighing over 13 carats and a minty-green tsavorite garnet of 12.91 carats. Just as bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on earth, there may be more gemstone-encrusted Chaumet shoots sprouting later this summer.
Graff
A pair of fluttering house sparrows is hardly a dramatic image, yet in the hands of Graff’s imaginative design director, Anne-Eva Geffroy, it becomes a subject worthy of capturing in the world’s rarest diamonds. Cue ‘The Gift of Love’, a singular high jewellery necklace created with 125 carat of flawless Graff diamonds. Three years in the making, the piece depicts a pair of tiny sparrows in flight (a bird often associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love), each poised at the tip of an open-ended necklace, with blue sapphire eyes and a glistening black onyx beak. One is poised, offering a treasure to its mate – a rare 13.51 carat fancy intense yellow ear-shaped diamond – while the other stretches out, its white diamond wings aloft, to receive it.
“In life, we are surrounded by nature. This jewellery creation allows us to witness an enchanting interaction between two creatures who are in perfect harmony and acting with love,” explains Geffroy. “Through the design, we work to portray the feeling and connection they have for one another – a demonstration of beauty and seduction.”
Piaget
Continuing the celebrations to mark its 150th anniversary, Piaget released a fresh wave of never-seen-before jewels as part of its ‘Essence of Extraleganza’ collection. Showcasing the astonishing skill of the maison’s goldsmiths, as well as its gem-setting prowess, these pieces all take their cue from the colourful stones and energetic patterns that first emerged during Piaget’s heyday, during the 1960s and 70s.
One show-stopping piece, a transformable necklace inspired by the outspread wings of a phoenix (or perhaps even a tropical flamingo in flight?), is crafted from scores of engraved rose gold feathers, set with an alluring array of rubies, pink sapphires and diamonds. A single pear-shaped rubellite weighing over 12 carats provides a glistening focal point and can also be removed and worn separately as a pendant.
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