It’s one thing to read about and see pictures of famous gemstones. Quite another to see and wear one in the flesh. In 1977, the jeweller Fred acquired a gemstone so special that it would become the stuff of legend: the 101.57-carat Soleil d’Or, a yellow diamond with a spectacular, hypnotic colour. When it was first sold to an American collector, the client couldn’t decide on how to set the gem in a jewel—and even up until Fred rediscovered and reacquired the Soleil d’Or in 2021, it remained a loose, unmounted stone. Well, not any more.
For the first time in its history, the Soleil d’Or has been set in a necklace, and it is the centrepiece and the most impressive jewel in Monsieur Fred Golden Light, the house’s latest collection of high jewellery. “It came to our minds as a dream at first,” Valérie Samuel, vice president, artistic director, and granddaughter of founder Fred Samuel told me at a preview in Paris of the idea to set the Soleil d’Or at long last.
The moment is apt. Fred celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, and the milestone is being taken as a celebration of both its history and future. Samuel explained to me that she and her design team envisioned the Golden Light collection as a circular moment, like the end of a sun cycle and the start of a new one.
CEO Vincent Reynes, who joined the house in September 2024, compared it to the recurring nature of life itself. “Everything goes in circles, that’s what life is like. Day and night, death and birth. Everything stops and restarts.”
In addition to presenting the new high jewellery collection in Paris, Fred also staged a heritage exhibition with pieces from its archives to tell its story. The heritage department at Fred is a relatively new undertaking: started in 2020, with a first full-scale retrospective exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2022, and ongoing activations dubbed Heritage Rendezvous where its archival pieces travel the world. The latest was staged in July in Kuala Lumpur, and in Singapore, albeit on a more casual scale, a handful of pieces have been flown in for the brand’s Marina Bay Sands boutique for the month of August.
“The biggest challenge for any luxury maison is not what we call brand awareness. That’s a relatively easy thing to do, making sure that people know about your name. To make sure that those people know you and understand you is a very different story,” said Reynes, who brings with him to Fred over two decades of experience in high jewellery nurtured at Bvlgari.
“Whenever you join a maison, especially a luxury maison, you need to absolutely dig into what we call the heritage,” he continued. Not unlike, he said, getting to meet and know a person. “If you want to become friends, you need to understand the person. A brand has a personality, and you need to understand it.” Once there is an understanding, he added, the role of custodians like himself and Samuel is to guide a maison’s evolution while being grounded in its authenticity. “The only way to know it is to have what Valérie has succeeded in building with Lisa (Jasinski, the head of patrimony at Fred) heading the heritage department.”
Fred has approached its heritage by playing up, firstly, the unique nature of its name. Nearly all of the most famous heritage brands are family surnames: Cartier after Louis-François, Chanel after Gabrielle, Bvlgari after Sotirio, Hermès after Thierry, and so on. “Having the first name of the founder is really the bone of the maison,” Samuel said of the difference. “Everything starts with the founder’s vision and personality. Today, as Fredys—we call ourselves Fredys—we’re really carrying on the vision of Fred Samuel.”
Hence the trilogy of Monsieur Fred high jewellery collections, which envision and spotlight the founder’s most closely held ideas, and which comes to a close this year with Golden Light. In it, Samuel and her design team drew from the light of the French Riviera to create jewels that travel the South of France.
The collection begins in Cannes, “perhaps at the end of the night after a beautiful jewellery party, like Monsieur Fred was hosting in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” said Valérie. Named Moonlight Reflection, it’s an imagined picture of a glamorous partygoer stepping out onto a balcony of a chateau for a breath of fresh air. The stars of the night sky are reflected on the sea, which has turned dark after the sun has set, its intense colours and starlight represented by deep, velvety tanzanites and diamond cascades. “The effervescence of the diamonds is like stars shimmering on water,” said Samuel. To emphasise the tanzanites’ colour, she used titanium setting prongs in matched shades of blue; and to add versatility, the necklaces, earrings and ring from the Moonlight Reflection suite can each be transformed to wear with or without their tanzanite centre stones.
If you’ve stayed long enough at the party, you might catch the sunrise. The collection’s second chapter, Promising Dawn, is inspired by a fleeting moment. “I wanted to express the flash of green light that can occur when the sun rises from the sea. It’s one instant,” Samuel explained.
To recreate that decisive moment, she chose Australian opals with flashes of green and blue, paired with emerald cabochons and pearls. The opals were cut thinly and in wedge shapes, and the house enlisted a Parisian artisan who specialises in watch dials to set these layers of opal. In order to keep the brooch and ring lightweight, the opals are set on a carbonium structure—a carbon fiber and polymer material created from aeronautics by-products that is said to be three times lighter than titanium.
Between the titanium and carbonium, these are unusual twists of savoir-faire that the grand haute joaillerie houses of Paris don’t usually employ. Samuel has used such subtle innovations before. In her earlier Monsieur Fred collections, she has explored doublets, a technique of stacking one gemstone on top of another. Typically, doublets are used to enhance undesirable stones. A more strongly coloured synthetic base might be used, for instance, to improve the appearance of a weakly coloured sapphire. In Fred’s hands, though, the doublet technique was used to create new colours specific to its vision—by layering white opals and turquoise to create the sun-dappled look of opalazur, or by combining precious sugarloaf-cuts and decorative stones to create the multidimensional appearance of swimming pool tiles.
These touches of innovation and the classical expectation of spectacular, rare gemstones is a balancing act. “Everything, especially in high jewellery, is about gemstones, and these are given by the Earth. We can search for them, we can find them, and our job and duty is to magnify their beauty,” said Samuel of her approach. “Having said that, just because it’s a beautiful gemstone and something magical, or maybe even an investment, that you cannot be creative around it.”
Not to say that Fred’s designs sacrifice the traditional beauty of high jewellery. The ability to paint with gemstones, create graduations of colour, and balance the chromatic with brilliance, for instance, is well exemplified by Golden Light’s third chapter, which evokes the early light of sunrise at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. A necklace, bracelet and ring are set with blue-green tourmalines that express the crystalline freshness of the sea very early in the morning.
And in its last chapter, which travels to the home of perfumery in Grasse, Samuel designed jewels inspired by both sight and smell. “My grandparents went on their honeymoon in the South of France in 1934, two years before the company was born. Because their honeymoon was in January, you can imagine they were surrounded by mimosa, which is a wintery flower.” To express the delicacy of these blooms, Fred used a delicate millegrain technique to shape its mimosa flowers with tiny gold beads. “This is actually the piece that required the most labour, because of the flower’s delicacy,” she said. Light, velvety and almost puffy, these detailed little flowers are set with yellow sapphires from Sri Lanka.
Beautiful and accomplished as these creations are, they are ultimately a prelude to the Golden Light collection’s single most important piece. The Soleil d’Or Golden Light necklace, which after 49 years sees the house’s emblematic diamond set at last in a jewel. The necklace is designed simply but beautifully: a radiating explosion of over 1,000 princess- and brilliant-cut white diamonds that express the solar energy of the Soleil d’Or diamond.
“They are set on a fil couteau (knife edge) to keep the lightness,” Samuel explained, referring to the haute joaillerie technique of setting gems on fine, thin lengths of gold. “When you wear it, you will see only the diamonds floating on your skin, or on a black dress.”
Surely, I asked Samuel, the design of such a momentous jewel must have taken some back and forth? “I have to say that [it] was quite immediate,” she replied. “That stone, as you’ve seen, is very hypnotic. It has such a strength of energy, light and the sun. It came very naturally. From the beginning it was really that necklace, that silhouette, and that know-how of using the knife-edge.”
Alas, as seductive as the Soleil d’Or diamond is, it is now part of the Fred patrimony; and—as the most tantalising things in life often are—not for sale. The necklace, however, has been designed so its central element can be replaced with a sister brooch. This sibling jewel is crafted in the same shape and virtually the same size as the Soleil d’Or, set with its own 11.25-carat Fancy Intense yellow diamond, bordered by yellow and white baguette diamonds.
When I asked Reynes if he had a favourite piece from the Golden Light collection, he admitted that the Soleil d’Or necklace was hard to beat. “It’s completely in the tradition of not only high jewellery,” he said, “but historical, exceptional pieces. It has a historical resonance, sheer beauty, a gemological resonance because of the stone, and a brand resonance because it represents entirely what Fred is about. It is the most complete piece basically.” I turned to Valérie then to ask her the same question, though before even saying a word I knew what her answer—the only answer—would be. She simply smiled, shrugged, and replied: “What more can I add?”
