Fine Jewelry Goes Bigger, Bolder and More Playful at This Year’s Couture Show in Las Vegas
If we had to choose one word to describe the jewelry collections introduced earlier this month at the Couture show in Las Vegas, that would be easy: exuberant. Evident in everything from the scale of the jewels that made their debut at the show (bigger, bolder and remarkably colorful) to the narratives designers used to explain them, the high-spirited mood that prevailed in Las Vegas reflected the buoyancy of the designer jewelry category, even in times of economic uncertainty.
Below, we’ve broken down the show’s numerous trends into discrete categories.
The Colors: Blues and Greens
With all due respect to Viva Magenta, Pantone’s 2023 color of the year, the palette at Couture leaned heavily on blues and greens, perennial jewelry favorites.
What’s new is the vast range of materials jewelers are now drawing upon to provide those colors. In her $12,000 Hourglass earrings, Los Angeles-based Emily P. Wheeler incorporated a bright green Burmese gem called maw sit sit. Often confused with jade, the esoteric stone, which Wheeler set in 18k yellow gold and accented with pink tourmaline, is emblematic of the wide variety of stones now available to jewelers, particularly those who source at the Tucson gem shows.
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At Sorellina, sisters Nicole and Kim Carosella featured a little-known blue gem called ceruleite in their 10th anniversary collection, an ode to the coastal Italian paradise of Capri (more on that below!).
At the other end of the material spectrum are brands like London-based Robinson Pelham, which showed its popular Chroma collection of bracelets and chains in a new ceramic-coated style. The range is available in black, white, orange, yellow, green, turquoise and pink, coupled with gold (we were partial to the green!).
The Inspiration: Travel
Three years and an age since the start of the pandemic, jewelers have vacation on the brain. Yasmin Tjoeng of Singapore-based Maison Tjoeng paid homage to classic holiday destinations such as Capri and Nantucket in a new series of 18k gold postcard pendants that feature finely detailed scenes painted by the designer’s cousin and reconstructed by her craftsman in ceramic directly on the gold. Coming soon: Honolulu and Cap Ferrat.
“I wanted to recreate the romance of the days of travel when we would be thinking of our loved ones and send a short but sweet message to them far away,” Tjoeng tells Robb Report. “I also wanted the postcards to be a sentimental personal connection to these locations, areas where people have cherished memories of spending entire summers, or somewhere they got married or met the love of their life.”
Nina Dzhokhadze, co-founder of London-based NeverNoT, was inspired by a similar urge. She introduced a charming new collection of 18k gold suitcase and sunglass pendants set with hard stones such as turquoise, pink opal and mother of pearl. “It’s the idea of luggage as a place to collect your memories,” she says.
The sisters behind Sorellina celebrated their 10th anniversary with a tribute to holidays in Capri, including long inlay earrings that evoke the look of mermaid tails and yellow opal earrings with an astonishing resemblance to real lemons.
Designer Eugenie Niarchos of London-based Venyx had a historic travel tradition in mind when she collaborated with the House of Le Sibille in Rome on her new Karya micromosaic necklace. Together, they used the ancient technique to create a scene depicting palm trees framed against the backdrop of a starry night sky, “a modern postcard for today’s Grand Tourists,” according to the press materials.
The Styles: Signet Rings, Linear Earrings and Elevated Chains
Plenty of designers turned out fresh takes on jewelry box staples such as signet rings, chain necklaces and long, drapey earrings in collections that championed classic looks—with a twist.
Athens-based Christina Alexiou introduced a line of 18k yellow gold signet rings featuring hand-carved motifs that wink at Greek and Roman mythology. Anita Ko, too, went heavy on the traditional ring style.
Elsewhere, deluxe yellow gold chains, with and without diamonds, were ubiquitous, but hardly pedestrian. Featuring handmade links in custom shapes, the chains seemed to follow one unspoken rule: Bigger is better. With one eye looking backward to the 1970s and another looking squarely at the present day, designers made sure that upon closer inspection, each seemingly classic chain had their unique point of view stamped all over it.
Melissa Kaye, for example, unveiled her $73,250 Lulu diamond chain set with 16 carats of diamonds, while Single Stone showed its new $25,000 Astraea pendant — a handcrafted sphere set with 6.6 carats of old cut and round brilliant diamonds — on its new $22,000 Mina Annex chain, a 22-inch long 18k yellow gold style distinguished by alternating solid rectangular links and beads.
The statement earring was also alive and well, particularly in long, linear styles that swing with the wearer—such as ARK Fine Jewelry’s Vibrations earrings featuring aquamarine, London Blue topaz, Sky Blue topaz and sapphires in an ombré range meant to capture “the depth and dimension of a pool of water.”
The Motifs: Bees, Butterflies and Beetles
Designers’ current obsession with the tiny beings that fly, crawl and slither among us saw its greatest expression in Harwell Godfrey’s “We Are Seeds” collection, which swarmed with bees and butterflies in 18k gold set with her signature inlay.
She wasn’t alone. The profusion of beetles at Couture, particularly the scarab variety associated with ancient Egypt, was impossible to ignore. Bibi Van Der Velden showed a range of 18-karat gold and gem-set scarabs—some covered with the iridescent blue-green wings of real scarab beetles (sustainably sourced, natch)—as a natural extension of her menagerie, including her signature alligator jewels.
The Vibe: Playful
Fine jewelers are feeling feisty. How else to explain the spirit of playfulness that characterized so many new collections in Las Vegas?
Take Van, a 3-year-old line of robot jewelry—gem-set, articulated 18k gold robots in the classic science fiction sense—designed in Rome and manufactured in Tuscany.
“I wanted something that represented the past and the future and at the same time I love articulated things,” says designer Tatiana Van Lancker. “I wanted to create a robot that wasn’t a scary monster.
The Parisian designer Marie Lichtenberg took the notion of play to the next level with her Magic 8 Ball necklace, a deluxe spin on the classic Magic 8 Ball toy manufactured by Mattel since the 1950s, right down to the window on the back that reveals cryptic answers to yes-or-no questions. The only difference between Lichtenberg’s 18k gold, diamond and enamel orb and the $10 toy? About $18,725.
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