A fascination with ancient Egypt is in the air again, and its allure, mysteries and beauty is most keenly felt with the latest collection of high jewellery by Van Cleef & Arpels. The redoubtable maison introduced Fascinating Egypt this year, revisiting a taste for Nilotic art and culture that has enthralled the jeweller since the 1920s.
Van Cleef & Arpels, founded in 1906, was born into a Paris that was already drawing inspiration from the aesthetics and art of ancient Egypt. Since the 1800s, parts of the highly exoticised near and middle East had started to show up in paintings, writings, monuments and furnishings in the City of Light. But it was really 1922, with Howard Carter’s rediscovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, that set off a craze: the Egyptomania of the ’20s, when the great jewellers and clients in Paris became truly besotted with Ankhs, eyes of Horus, scarabs and plenty more from the splendid well of Egyptian mythology.
Around a century since that first wave of fascination took Paris, it seems only apt that Egypt is back in the spotlight. “For many years, the maison Van Cleef & Arpels, so inspired by Egypt in the 1920s, has wished to prolong the story and present its own vision of this ancient heritage,” CEO Catherine Rénier explained in a statement.
Fascinating Egypt approaches its theme—so ripe for pastiche—with reverence and respect. In nearly 180 creations, the house has drawn from both the vestiges of the old world and modern artistic interpretations to form its own timeless perspective. What Van Cleef & Arpels achieves is the seamless union of its peerless jewellery artistry with the enduring beauty of ancient Egypt. The designs embody at once the modern and the ancient, balancing grandeur with delicate refinement in a way few houses can rival.
When faced with an enchanting set of 37 pear-shape Zambian emeralds—intensely green, with a luminous, brilliant crystalline quality, and perfectly matched—the minds at Van Cleef & Arpels’ design studio went not to opulence and grandeur. Instead, the house’s designers were inspired to think of idyllic life on the shores of the Nile. The river’s gentle waters, the fan shapes of papyrus plants swaying on the Nile, and birds flying soundlessly overhead.
The Rivage Égyptien necklace embodies that romantic vision of daily life, with a design of 17 draped palmettes. The setting for each emerald is custom-made, enhancing both their individuality and the harmony of the whole design, and a sense of movement is created by a composition of round, baguette and pear-shape diamonds, and polished bands of warm yellow gold that accentuate the necklace’s contours.
Just as Egyptologists dig and sieve to find treasures of the old world, Van Cleef & Arpels has dreamt up a trio of Fragment clips akin to archaeological discoveries. The maison designed these jewels as hieroglyphic friezes, ‘broken’ as if millennia of sand and stone had kept its secrets. Perfection comes through, instead, in the sublime combination of a cushion-cut centre gemstone and geometric decorative stones. On this Fragment de Bonheur, a quadrant of flawless, unblemished turquoise evokes the blue of a cloudless sky, with a radiant spessartite garnet like the searing midday sun. Yellow gold and diamonds form a cryptic message in hieroglyphs that, when deciphered, reveals the name of the creation.
Van Cleef & Arpels has a long and illustrious history of crafting enchantingly detailed figurine clips—traditionally, of romantic feminine figures like ballerinas and faeries set with rose-cut diamond faces. A thematic collection, however, offers the maison scope for greater invention. In Fascinating Egypt, there are two series of figurine clips: masculine pharaonic figures, and feminine muses inspired by Cleopatra. Van Cleef & Arpels has rendered the famed Ptolemaic queen of Egypt in a majestic pose, wielding an Ankh in one hand to symbolise life, and a sceptre in the other to symbolise power. In this Muse Triomphale creation, the joys of victory are expressed through a costume of precious streams of emeralds, rubies and sapphires.
Among the maison’s most coveted signatures is the Zip necklace, its ingenious sliding design inspired by the advent of the zipper in fashion—a testament to the maison’s enduring dialogue with haute couture. Almost a distillation of this artistic impulse and essence, this Manchette Impériale imagines the zip not as a necklace but as a cuff bracelet. The teeth details are recreated in finely sculpted platinum, and yellow, white and rose gold, dotted with diamonds. Ancient Egypt is evoked with supreme subtlety on the clasp of the bracelet, which is shaped with a geometric precision that contrasts against the piece’s supple articulation. The effect of these angled gold facets and diamonds: a sublimated evocation of pyramid silhouettes.
Wings are a prominent and powerful bit of Egyptian iconography. They represent, in ancient Egyptian art and hieroglyphs, the heavens above and the divine protection of goddesses. A modern envisioning of this power and symbolism: the single-winged Aile Majestueuse clip, with geometric lines of baguette- and calibré-cut emeralds and sapphires, set with a stunningly clear 3.50-carat emerald-cut DFL Type IIa diamond. The dual blue and green palette evokes the colours of Egyptian faience, while the crystalline perfection and ordered geometry of bead-set diamonds add a simultaneous touch of timelessness and modernity.
Photography Eva Wang
Set design Lou Saveria
Art direction Nicholas See
Producers David Bay, Marie-Amélie Alindré/Ôpos, and Balthazar Astier/Lambert | Lambert
The September 2026 ‘Beyond The New’ edition of Vogue Singapore is available online and on newsstands.
