Steps off the Place Vendôme, under the eaves of a 19th-century building on a sunny late-summer afternoon, Van Cleef & Arpels artisans are putting the finishing touches on the luxury brand’s latest high jewelry collection, Treasure Island. Inspired by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure, the collection will be unveiled in late November in Miami and New York.
At one table, a jeweler, dressed in a white lab coat, quietly pieces together the “Pirate John” clip. The director of Van Cleef’s High Jewelry workshop (who can’t be named here for security reasons), a 35-year veteran of the company who is guiding the tour, explains that a “brooch” has one pin on the back and a “clip” has two.
Tiffany & Co. necklace in platinum with sapphire and diamonds.
At another station, a lapidary quietly polishes a pea-size red garnet on his lapping machine. “We call that Giving the stone sunlight,” the director says. The garnet would soon be set into the end of a yellow-gold telescope belonging to “Pirate Jim,” a clip with the peg-legged seaman perched in a crow’s nest made of rose gold and festooned with tiny white diamonds and yellow sapphires.
“When people look at the finished pieces, their faces transform—like the face of a child discovering a treasure,” the director says. “But the artisans are happiest when the piece is sold and will be worn.” Both will no doubt happen for Pirate John and Pirate Jim.
Dior Fine Jewelry Diorama & Diorgami ring.
High jewelry—the jewelry business’s top segment of one-of-a-kind pieces that start around $30,000 and rise swiftly into six and seven figures—is in the throes of a boom. In 2023, the global luxury jewelry market was valued at approximately $50 billion. Of that, the U.S. accounts for $11.5 billion, according to Future Market Insights, and it is expected to reach $18 billion by 2033.
The surge is coming from a category of consumers that, until recently, were not your typical high jewelry buyers: young; female; Asian; tech entrepreneurs. Phillips auction house saw this in October, when its Hong Kong Jewels Auction recorded an 89% year-on-year increase, with bidders “paying strong prices for rare colored gemstones and signed pieces,” for a total of $6.6 million, says Phillips’s Worldwide Head of Jewelry Benoît Repellin.
Jewelry designers and executives say they see a rising demand for investment pieces, an increased appreciation for craftsmanship, and a decisive turn toward customization and personalization. And high jewelry is no longer stored in a safe, only to be trotted out for opera galas and state dinners. It is worn in the wild.
Nigel O’Reilly necklace in 18K rose gold with morganite and diamonds.
“This rising interest in high jewelry has been propelled by the fashion brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, and Prada entering the high jewelry arena,” explains jewelry editor Carol Woolton, author of If Jewels Could Talk, published by Simon & Schuster and based on her hit podcast of the same name. “They have pushed it on runways, keeping visibility high with fashion, and they have pushed it creatively—like Victoire de Castellane, the jewelry designer at Dior, and Francesca Amfitheatrof at Vuitton, who are designing high jewelry that younger women want to wear. Until fashion brands got in the game, high jewelry had been quite safe—diamond necklaces had been diamond necklaces. The fashion brand designers mixed it all up, and precious began to look different—witty, relevant, and modern.”
Graff bracelet in white gold and platinum, with sapphire and diamonds.
Van Cleef & Arpels earring in 18K yellow gold, with garnets and diamonds.
Nowhere was this more in evidence recently than in Venice in September. On the film festival’s red carpet, Jenna Ortega wore a Bois de Rose diamond-studded necklace by Dior Joaillerie and Justin Theroux pinned Tiffany & Co.’s iconic Bird on a Rock brooch on his tuxedo lapel for the opening night premiere of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; Rachel Weisz, who accompanied her husband Daniel Craig for the premiere of his latest film, Queer, dazzled in Boucheron’s diamond Serpent Boheme Necklace; Cate Blanchett, star of Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer, sported a mod Louis Vuitton diamond-and-pearl ear cuff; and for the closing ceremony, jury president Isabelle Huppert sexed up her prim white Balenciaga gown with a Cartier diamond tasseled belly chain.
Cartier necklace in 18K yellow gold with tourmaline, peridot, sapphires, and diamonds.
At Homo Faber, the month-long, biennial craftsmanship exhibition at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on San Giorgio Maggiore island, spectacular pieces by Cartier, Buccellati, and Van Cleef & Arpels were among the 800 artisanal objects on display. At Diane von Furstenberg’s DVF Awards at the Arsenale, Mozambican and South African stateswoman Graça Machel, who received the DVF Lifetime Leadership Award, wore a Graff parure so monumental it was blinding. And at the Pomellato dinner at the Ca’ d’Oro Museum, to celebrate the Milanese jeweler’s latest restoration project with Venetian Heritage—five state-of-the-art vitrines to protect the museum’s prized Bernini terracotta models—the brand’s Creative Director Vincenzo Castaldo presented his latest masterwork: The Bernini Loupe, a diamond and rose-gold necklace with a dome-shaped rock crystal pendant cut to look like a magnifying glass.
“The Bernini Loupe necklace is an invitation to pause and appreciate beauty up close, just as Bernini’s models offer us a window into his creative genius,” Castaldo said. Of course, in Bernini’s time—indeed, until the mid–20th century—all fine jewelry from heritage houses like Cartier, Chaumet, Boucheron, Mellerio dits Meller, Bulgari, and Van Cleef & Arpels was “high jewelry,” meaning it was unique, produced with the finest materials available, and often made-to-order. Beyond that, there was costume, or “fantasy” jewelry. There wasn’t much in between.
Chanel ring in 18K pink gold, with sapphires and diamonds.
Nigel O’Reilly earrings in 18K white gold and black rhodium, with rubies, pink and orange sapphires, and diamonds.
That all changed in 1953, when Van Cleef introduced La Boutique, a ready-to-wear–like line that was “easier to wear, less formal, and less expensive,” says Nicolas Bos, chief executive of Richemont, the Swiss luxury group that owns Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, and Buccellati. In the early 1970s, he continues, Cartier introduced a similar ready-to-wear–like line called Le Must de Cartier, which also offered more affordable pieces, making fine jewelry, like designer fashion, more democratic.
In the late 1970s, demand for high jewelry began to drop, in part, Bos explains, because of “the oil crisis,” which sent the world economy into a long recession. But also, he says, because “there was a disconnect between high jewelry and the world of art, decorative arts, and couture. Museums of decorative art were a bit dormant, and everybody was very much about conceptual art, visual arts, movies. Decorative art was seen as an old industry.”
Chopard earrings in 18K white gold and titanium with orange and yellow sapphires and diamonds.
When the boom-boom 1980s arrived and Wall Street soared, high jewelry came back into fashion. But, Bos says, it was “very, very classical, centered on precious stones—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and there were reeditions or reproductions of designs from the Art Deco period or from the ’50s.”
In the minimalist 1990s, all that went out of fashion. Jewelry design was spare, clean, understated. And so it stayed, until the global financial crisis hit in 2007, bringing luxury spending to an abrupt, if brief, halt. When the economy finally rebounded, society’s economic makeup split sharply into two camps: the one percent, and the rest.
This is an expert from PALMER Vol.6. To see the full story, purchase your copy of the magazine here. Lead image: Chanel bracelet in 18K white and yellow gold with topaz, pearls, and diamonds.
Retouching: Jan Cihak
Digital Tech: Richard Bowyer
Photo Assistant: Aline Blocman