If anything set the tone for high jewellery at the 2026 edition of Paris Haute Couture Week, it was Teyana Taylor’s appearance outside Monday’s kick off Schiaparelli show, dressed in a hand-cut lace dress with a crystal-encrusted bow neckline, paired with a coronation- (and Oscar win-) worthy pearl-encrusted tiara.
Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry is no stranger to a little tongue-in-cheek inspiration (remember the furore around Kylie Jenner’s 2023 taxidermy-inspired lion dress?), and Taylor’s headpiece was inspired by one of the items stolen in the infamous Louvre heist last October. The haul included a 19th-century tiara that belonged to Empress Eugénie, set with 212 pearls and 2,000 diamonds. High jewellery heads will know that Empress Eugénie married the grandson of Empress Joséphine, the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. Joséphine wore a Chaumet tiara at her coronation in 1804, and has been a source of inspiration for the Place Vendôme jeweller for more than two centuries. (A transformable diadem accented with grand feu enamel and midnight-blue sapphires features in the maison’s latest Envol high jewellery collection.)
Read on for more highlights from the high jewellery presentations at Paris Haute Couture week.
Jaw-dropping stones
Jewellers will keep astonishing stones in their archives for years before they are set into a piece of show-stopping jewellery. Case in point: David Morris’s Queen Of The Sea ring features the largest known natural near-spherical pearl in the world, the gobstopper-size starting point for a suite of green, pink and orange diamonds.
Meanwhile, fellow London jeweller Graff unveiled a choker set in a fabric of almost 2,000 diamonds, with a 31-carat emerald-cut blue sapphire at its centre. Victoire de Castellane, artistic director of Dior Joaillerie, is best known for her love of opals, but for her latest Belle Dior collection, she used smooth and juicy sugarloaf cut tanzanites and rubellites for the first time. (Elizabeth Taylor owned one of the world’s valuable renowned sugarloaf cut jewels: a Bvlgari sapphire and diamond sautoir she was gifted by her husband Richard Burton for her 40th birthday.) At Dior, they featured as the star stones in two asymmetric multi-strand necklaces, inspired by fringes of ribbon and grosgrain.
The haute couture atelier
When Dior reopened its legendary Avenue Montaigne boutique in 2022, the maison’s high jewellery workshop was installed above its haute couture ateliers for the first time. There’s long been a material fluidity to Victoire de Castellane’s creations—thanks in part to her attention to how precious stones and metals interact with bare skin. Belle Dior nods directly to the grosgrain ribbons and lightweight tassels essential to dressmaking, with the collection’s standout Soleil Céleste set featuring a bib necklace exploding with delicate and talismanic fringes of diamond stars and hearts, yellow diamond flowers, plus moons carved from black opal doublets.
“He did everything!” Boucheron creative director Claire Choisne declared of house founder Frédéric Boucheron, who not only brought jewellery to the Place Vendôme in 1893, but also invented the clasp-less necklace and bought realism-steeped depictions of the natural world to the workbench. Viewing jewellery as an extension of clothing, Choisne has previously incorporated grosgrain, lace and bow motifs into Boucheron’s high jewellery collections, because its founder grew up as the son of a draper. For the house’s latest high jewellery collection, Choisne drew on this lineage with two fluid epaulettes, featuring over seven metres of bezel-set diamond chains, which can be transformed into six different pieces, including a double drop sautoir necklace, two Art Deco-inspired brooches, and a choker.
There was also a confluence between the worlds of high jewellery and haute couture on the catwalks. At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy’s couture debut featured a host of mind-boggling techniques, including an oversized shirt and skirt worn as a closing bridal look crafted from layers of shaven mother of pearl. Elsewhere, lighter-than-air jackets were hemmed with lengths of pearls and chain, to ensure they hung perfectly on the body, while oversized jewels that appeared to shimmer with diamonds and emeralds were crafted to trompe-l’œil effect from hundreds of micro-beads.
The archive
The phenomenal success of Tiffany & Co.’s reissued Bird On A Rock collection (hi, Heated Rivalry’s Connor Storrie at the Golden Globes!) signals a renewed interest in antique design on and off the red carpet. Cartier, who also dresses its starry ambassadors in archive designs, presented pieces from its latest collection alongside rare Cartier Collection gems, to show the synergy between its historical and contemporary creations. Think: Art Deco tie pins and minaudières.
At Boucheron, Claire Choisne looked to the first unrealised sketch Frédéric Boucheron made of an asymmetric clasp-free necklace, affectionately dubbed the Question Mark. The design, trailing with ivy leaves, reflected the founder’s obsession with unruly, naturalistic motifs (he filled the vitrines of his Place Vendôme store with parsley and hazelnuts). Choisne brought the piece to life as an articulated rock crystal and diamond necklace, which can be transformed into pieces including a hair jewel, collar necklace or brooch. If it looks familiar? Colman Domingo wore the design as a series of shimmering lapel pins on the Golden Globes red carpet.
At Chaumet, the house opened its archive to press for the first time, showcasing the historic winged styles it has crafted since the turn of the 19th century that have inspired its latest Envol offering. Art patron and society heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney famously owned a Chaumet tiara with articulated wings which transformed into two brooches. This design inspired the house’s latest diadem, which morphed into not just clips, but a mask, too.
Colour!
A 2025 engagement ring trend set to sparkle stronger than ever in 2026? Personality-led coloured stones. David Morris’s Legacy of Colour collection features the Lotus Ring, a design set with an astonishingly rare 23.41-carat oval Ceylon Padparadscha sapphire, which sits somewhere between a pink and orange shade. Elsewhere, the third and final chapter of Cartier’s En Équilibre collection includes the Euphonia necklace, which features a geometric combination of baguette and brilliant-cut diamonds and rubies.
Repossi—which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year—is a house associated with white diamonds. But for its high jewellery Blast collection, creative director Gaia Repossi also took coloured stones as her starting point. A chunky rose gold cuff, ring, and earrings are set with an asymmetric huddle of mandarin garnets, peach tourmalines, yellow topazes and citrines, inspired by a rainbow-hued brooch and pair of drop earrings designed by her grandfather, Constantino, in the 2000s. Lastly, Pomellato unveiled Pentagoni, a high jewellery collection that taps into the current craze for cappuccino-hued stones, with a pebble-like necklace, ring and earrings all dusted with brown diamonds.
Coloured stones weren’t the only way which in which jewellers injected oomph into their collections. At Chaumet, the maison’s winged creations were accented with a vivid dégradé of blues, crafted in grand feu enamel. This enhanced the midnight-blue Madagascan sapphires in the collection’s transformable tiara, necklace and brooch. At Dior, a lacquering technique saw vivid blue and green hues applied to an openwork lace grid of gold. This vivid technique enhanced the stones in miniature foliage-inspired earrings, set with indigolites, lagoon tourmalines, garnets, sapphires, emeralds and rubies.
Transformability
On the second night of Haute Couture Week, De Beers hosted an intimate party in celebration of its new boutique on Rue de la Paix in Paris. Here, Lily Allen treated guests to a trio of divorce anthems, all while wearing The Echo, a necklace rippling with over 193 carats of round- and baguette-cut white diamonds, with an exceptional 1.12-carat Fancy Intense Blue diamond at its centre. Transformability is key to high jewellery design, and this piece can be modified into six pieces—including a tiara, a bracelet and tasselled earrings. At Chaumet, the house’s latest diadem can be transformed into brooches and even a mask, while at Cartier, the jellyfish-inspired Ondora necklace strung with chrysoprase beads and spinel cabochons features an adjustable pendant that trails down the back of the body.
This article was originally published on British Vogue.
