PARIS — High fashion week here offered a glittering Parisian conclusion to a season of traveling jewelry showcases, with historic houses and independent names making a reveal or giving an encore of their latest designs.

And whether used to double down on established codes or carve out recent ones, color continued to dominate the collections shown last week, particularly in diamonds.

One would have been forgiven for forgetting that yellow ones are a rarity of nature given their profusion in collections shown in Paris, starting with Graff, where many gradations were on display within the “Sunrise” line showcased in its Saint-Honoré flagship.

“Now for engagement rings, you will have more ladies selecting yellow [diamonds] as a substitute of white,” revealed design director Anne-Eva Geffroy, reminding that Laurence Graff was among the many first to gather them.

The star of the exhibition was the pear-shaped 30.28-carat fancy intense yellow centerpiece diamond, flanked by an additional 167 carats of yellow and white diamonds on a never-seen-before necklace. But there have been plenty more, including a necklace made from a cascade of yellow pear-shaped gems that morphed right into a line of rail-set baguettes, and a row of golden brilliant-cut stones lined with a second row of white.

That contrast was also front and center at Messika, where founder Valérie Messika said that the sunny hue of yellow diamonds was reinforced by their pristine counterparts, and vice versa.

The five-set first a part of the “Midnight Sun” collection marked her tenth anniversary in high jewelry, casting yellow diamonds as a logo of the “brilliance of the sun in the course of the night” — or reasonably the glamorous ’70s club scene.

Beyond the reveal of stunners that included the mirror-polish Ultimate Party collar featuring a 20-carat pear-cut yellow diamond and 9-carat cushion-cut diamond “made to shine but additionally to make you are feeling empowered,” Messika “found very interesting to [use couture] as a teaser and to subscribe more in the style moment, which is sort of competitive.”

Revealing 80 percent of the gathering in September in a runway show during Paris Fashion Week is a way for her to talk of high jewelry “another way, in a more casual way,” she said, particularly at a time when clients are increasingly reaching for designs that may be worn reasonably than stored.

“Before, it was just this opulent aspect and things that were so heavy that you just wore them once in a lifetime, then parked them in your secure,” said Delfina Delettrez Fendi, who attributed this sense of ease in high jewelry to the rise of female jewelers and consumers acquiring high-value items for themselves, reasonably than as gifts.

But don’t mistake purchases made for oneself as being less meaningful. “There may be a recent energy around it. I at all times say that taking a look at a lady’s hand is like an inverted palm reading because these small objects are an extension [of one’s identity] and they impart,” she said.  

A yr within the making, the Fendi Triptych collection, which was the springboard for Kim Jones’ graceful yet easy to wear fall 2023 couture designs, was articulated into three chapters, with pink-hued Roma Rosa; yellow-toned stones for Gioiello Giallo, in a nod to the home’s signature color, and Bianco Brillante, which Delettrez Fendi described as “an absence of color homage to white diamonds.”

Throughout, the jeweler played with interlinked Fs, by turn cursive shapes that formed pseudo-classic curlicues; entwined geometrically to create an abstract chain-link for a necklace, or repeated in wave-like successions. Elsewhere, she identified a house version of the baguette cut was the “logo inside the emblem” that Delettrez Fendi wants to put in as a signature.

Although the 30 designs she imagined for her first full-fledged collection for the Roman house carry a price tag that ranges from $60,000 to $1.3 million, the set of 61 pink spinels that form a crescendo on the Undarum portrait necklace took a specialist collector 40 years to source, she said at a preview of the gems.

“You are feeling a deep sense of responsibility” when faced with heritage of that kind, she said, particularly when compounded by the million-year journey stones took to achieve the surface — not to say the history of her family.

While high jewelry isn’t exactly quiet luxury, De Beers Diamond Jewellers chief executive officer Céline Assimon likewise saw that clients are less enthusiastic about “flamboyant presence” but are searching for pieces that would go the additional mile.

Hence the variety of designs with removable elements — lacquered layers, ring jackets or diamond motifs — within the second chapter of Metamorphosis, a group inspired by nature’s transformations in the course of the 4 seasons. “These aren’t diamonds you permit within the vault,” she said.

“The pieces we’re showing are conversation starters,” Assimon continued, recounting how the platinum and titanium Winter tiara with its seven diamonds — including the central Natural Works of Art 8.5-carat pear-cut D-flawless one — had inspired a client as a jewel to wear but additionally a option to showcase gems in her collection.

One other conversation is the query of provenance and traceability, she said, with the subject increasingly brought up and evaluated by clients ahead of purchases.

As “healthy competition” and the arrival of “drastically different points of view between houses” broadened the high jewelry field, a fundamental shift she’s seen in recent times has been increasingly versatile designs with more casual options; the importance of color, particularly in diamonds, and the parallel rise in value and reduce in size as clients reached for rarer gems. “Educating the audience, our clients and our guests by showing them the range of colours in diamonds is our purpose,” said Assimon.

Highlights included the two.78-carat fancy intense pinkish purple cushion on the ring of the Spring set, fancy dark green-gray pear-shaped diamond removable pendant on a Winter collar necklace or the two.03 carat fancy vivid orange diamond presented loose with suggested design sketches and valued north of $11 million.

Although pearls remain the core of Tasaki’s collections, president and CEO Toshikazu Tajima remarked that prices of coloured diamonds were rising sharply. “Especially pink, after they closed down the [Argyle] mine. They have gotten 10 times costlier than 4 or five years ago, but customers still want them,” he said.

The Japanese jeweler’s Nature Spectacle collection, which spanned six sets, played on a variety of colours to precise the fantastic thing about the ocean, as inspired by the locales where its pearls are cultivated. There have been diamonds, in fact, but additionally an array of sapphires, morganites and tourmalines, to depict the pink lights of a shallow and clear lagoon within the Flourish set or graphic stream of water in Cascade’s Paraiba and pearls assortment.  

Here, too, “customers want something they’ll wear on a variety of occasions,” said the manager, highlighting that buyers were also increasingly sensitive to design over the pure investment value of a jewel’s constituting elements.

Reaching for stones of remarkable quality, even when which means compromising on carat weight, can be an underlying movement that Chaumet CEO Jean-Marc Mansvelt has observed for the reason that COVID-19 pandemic trailed off.

“We even see it in solitaire rings and more quotidian designs,” he said.

But that’s not the largest challenge faced by jewelry houses. “Finding the stones is the challenge and it’s turn out to be extremely complicated. After I began, you can draw a set and source the stones. Now, we now have decided not to begin a design without having all of the stones available.”

He attributed this to a growing high jewelry market, with an increasing variety of participants in addition to increasing consumer demand. Not that increased scarcity was felt within the “Le Jardin de Chaumet” collection that explored the natural world, a recurring theme for the home.  

Best within the lineup were the Ecorce set, that figured sap — a 50.61 black Australian opal on the necklace — bursting through gem-encrusted bark; the graphic sweep of calla lilies within the Arum designs, with yellow Ceylon sapphires and diamonds, in addition to the Blé necklace that may very well be worn 3 ways because of its naturalistic crown of ears of wheat that got here paired with a pointy line of diamonds.

Although multiple wears or shareable sets continued to be a way of ensuring pieces would stay out of vaults, the Chaumet executive said offering such designs — 11 could transform here — had less to do with trend and more to do with the enthusiastic welcome of clients. “Everyone surely sees the playful side of doing all your own thing by wearing it your way,” he said.

At Boucheron, playfulness was definitely built into every aspect of the More Is More collection designed by creative director Claire Choisne as a part of her annual Carte Blanche summer offering.

Taking its cues as much from the Memphis Group as from the world of comic strips, she imagined larger-than-life pieces that played on easy volumes and huge scale to create delight — the gathering was imagined at the top of 2020, when France was within the throes of its second lockdown.

Choisne’s designs ranged from giant cocktail rings made from Murano glass or rock crystal spheres full of yellow sapphires, and brooches shaped like hoodie drawstrings; to hair scrunchies with tsavorite-encrusted baubles and a surreal XXL hair bow paved in diamonds and crafted from bioacetate and magnesium, a metal 10 times lighter than gold.