When I caught up over a call with Choo Yilin, the Singapore jeweller said to have made jade cool again, she had to put me on hold several times as she crossed busy streets. I was calling from Singapore, and Choo from London where she’s recently moved (more on that later). There’s some coincidence—in a video she produced for her latest collection, the opening scene is of the narrator’s grandmother on honeymoon in Oxford. “Naturally, people who’ve watched it have assumed that the British setting must have been inspired by my move to London,” Choo told Vogue Singapore. “The truth is, I conceptualised the film long before we even knew we’d be moving here! There’s something wonderfully serendipitous about the timing.”
Timing, it seems, has had a big hand in Choo’s latest works. Her newest collection, The Flowers We Inherited, centres on a garden of flower motifs—ones she has worked with since its earliest days, and new blooms that are enriching the Choo Yilin universe. “The Flowers We Inherited is, in many ways, a retrospective,” she tells us. The camellia, for instance, was the first flower the jeweller used in her collections in 2009, and it’s making a comeback in her latest outing. Plum blossoms, meanwhile, are a new addition.
“When I first designed the camellia, I was largely concerned with how to translate a flower into something beautiful and wearable,” Choo explains. “Revisiting it now, I’m much more interested in what it means to inherit a visual language, and how we reinterpret it for our own time.”
A sense of inheritance has, after all, been central to this jewellery brand’s perspective. It has called itself—more than just a maker of product—a carrier of Asian stories, and Choo tells us that her jewels look both forwards and back: influenced by the women who came before us, and crafted for those who will come after. One of her inspirations is her five-generation family upbringing in the Joo Chiat neighbourhood of Singapore, a hub of Peranakan culture and visual arts.
Peranakan botanical decorations, architecture and textiles have fed into her work, even if subconsciously. “When I think about my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, I often wonder how much of their aesthetic world I absorbed without consciously realising it. The flowers that appeared on the tiles, fabrics and objects around me became part of my visual vocabulary long before I began designing jewellery.” That reflective evolution and change in perspective, she adds, is what has pruned and nourished her current floral designs.
One other evolution to the world of Choo Yilin has been an expansion of its worldview to include diamonds. Not, however, the readily available modern cuts of diamonds. True to its love for ancestry and heritage, Choo the brand and jeweller work specifically with old cut diamonds. These are vintage and antique diamonds that were hand-faceted before the invention of the modern brilliant cut. The difference is that modern cuts have standardised numbers of facets, and are optimised for brilliance and sparkle under electric lights. Old cuts have a softer, more romantic look and are sometimes dubbed candlelight diamonds for how they come to life in dimmer settings.
Choo tells us that though she had been privately collecting old cut diamonds for a time, the rarity and difficulty of sourcing them (in Singapore, at least) made it unfeasible to develop collections with them. “Over the years, however, we’ve lovingly accumulated a small collection of old mine cuts—finally enough to begin creating jewellery with them.”
The jump from jade to diamonds took a bit of philosophical exploration. “For many years, we were almost exclusively focused on jade because we saw ourselves as carriers of Asian stories,” Choo admits. “But I’ve come to realise that this was perhaps an unnecessarily narrow interpretation of our own identity!” The connection she’s landed on is the shared preciousness that both gems carry across generations, and the possibilities of giving material traditions a contemporary expression.
Her timing couldn’t be better. As lab-grown options have flooded and nigh overtaken the market, jewellery clients and collectors are looking for diamonds with non-cookie-cutter individuality—something special that charms and romances. I’ve spoken, in fact, with several jewellery industry insiders who have been sourcing old mine cut diamonds for their own engagement rings or personal jewellery. A sign, perhaps, of the direction tastemakers in the know are looking in.
“I’m probably terribly biased, but I genuinely can’t see their growing popularity as anything other than a wonderful thing,” Choo says when I ask her how she sees the rise in stature of these diamonds. She points out that these old cuts were fashioned with each individual stone cutter’s judgement in beauty and proportion, and can have “wonderfully individual personalities. Their proportions, facets and the way they interact with light can vary enormously from one stone to another.”
That one-of-one feeling intersects nicely with the brand’s expertise in jade. “No two pieces of jadeite are exactly alike,” Choo explains. “We often allow the particular colour, translucency and character of a stone to guide our design decisions.” The brand follows the same approach with old cut diamonds, celebrating its individual qualities “rather than treating diamonds as interchangeable stones,” she explains. A superb silhouette, unique arrangement of facets, or a special way a diamond might play with light—”those are qualities we want to celebrate rather than disguise.”
Another highlight in The Flowers We Inherited is a line of azure jade hydrangea designs. It’s the first time the brand has worked with this shade of natural untreated Type A jadeite. “It’s an extraordinarily beautiful colour that reminds me of the sky just after rainfall: soft, luminous and slightly moody.”
After nearly 20 years, might a jade jewellery brand not have run the gamut? Not quite, and even for Choo the diversity of colours that jade can occur in continues to surprise. “I think jade is still too often associated almost exclusively with green, particularly the deep emerald green that many people consider its most desirable expression,” she says. Broadening the horizons and fostering appreciation of jade’s wide, wonderful colour spectrum, Choo says, is “part of our responsibility, and also our creative pleasure, as jade specialists”.
The Flowers We Inherited, which goes on sale at the end of October exclusively on a three-day digital trunk show, might be Choo’s last collection to come out of Singapore for a while. The designer and founder recently started a new chapter of life in London, though when I asked her about it she is quick to reassure me that “while our surroundings may change, the heart of our work remains very much the same.”
Oddly enough, the distance has prompted a refreshed appreciation in her for home. “If anything, living further away from Singapore has made me even more conscious of the things we carry with us: our memories, our cultural inheritance and the stories that continue to shape who we are,” she admits. I suggest to Choo that being in Europe might make sourcing old cut diamonds much easier, a thought she seemed quite happy with. In fact—when we spoke over the phone, Choo was walking to Mayfair to attend PAD London, the art and design fair in which some of the world’s best contemporary jewellery designers exhibit. As in the case of her Straits Chinese ancestors all those years ago—who knows?—a change of scene might bring wonderful things to come.
Choo Yilin’s The Flowers We Inherited will be on sale from 31 October to 2 November 2026 exclusively online.
