You enter another dimension, where conversation is refined, art is breathed naturally, and jewels reveal themselves not only through beauty, but through originality, intention and inner coherence.

Shira Ghaffari is a woman deeply devoted to beauty, art and meaning. Her name, as she told me, evokes the idea of what is essential, and indeed, everything about her speaks of values, consistency and depth.

What makes the world of VESCOVI Milano so compelling is precisely this transmission: the passage of a vision, a culture and a way of looking at beauty from mother to son.

If I had to describe ODEA, the signature collection of VESCOVI Milano, I would use one word: harmony.

For the ancient Greeks, harmony was not merely beauty. It was a principle of order, proportion and measure: a beauty born from balance, from the accord of sounds, from the invisible relationship between different elements.

The same idea can be found in the creations of the Maison: the rigour of the design, the measured elegance of each line, and the subtle composition of light, colour and proportion.

ODEA is articulated in nine Suites, each bearing the name of a divinity or figure from Greek mythology. Each Suite is dedicated to a colour universe and composed of necklaces, bracelets, chains and modular elements that can be transformed and reinterpreted by the woman who wears them.

Here, the chain is not a constraint. It becomes a symbol of freedom: a structure that allows movement, transformation and personal expression.

ODEA invites each woman to compose her own Suite, choosing colour palettes and harmonies of composition that resonate with her personal taste and her way of inhabiting beauty.

Like a symphony, the different elements can be combined in multiple ways, creating rhythm and balance. Nothing is rigid, nothing is imposed. The jewel becomes a living language, an open system of signs, proportions and colours that evolves with the wearer.

There is also a poetic resonance hidden in the name itself. Read backwards, ODEA becomes AEDO, the Italian word for the ancient Greek aoidos, the singer and poet who, in archaic Greece, was considered a divinely inspired voice, guided by the Muses.

This subtle inversion opens a beautiful interpretation: ODEA is not only an ode to beauty, but also a form of song, a jewel-like composition in which colour, light and craftsmanship become a language of inspiration.

Iscriviti

Mandami un messaggio

I did not discover her through a filmography, a retrospective, or an official tribute. I discovered her as a child, watching Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard”. I was so deeply captivated by Angelica Sedara that I named my daughter after her.

There was something about her that stayed with me forever: a slightly wild beauty, a natural sensuality that never felt constructed, and an extraordinary screen presence. Angelica did not simply enter a room. She moved through it like a force of nature. She carried with her the future, desire, social ascent, and the pulse of life breaking into a world already destined to disappear.

The Leopard was an enchantment for me. I watched it at least three times. The music made me dream. And that ballroom scene, with Burt Lancaster as the Prince of Salina, remains one of the most powerful images in the history of cinema: aristocratic grandeur, the melancholy of an ending, youth advancing, splendor already turning into memory.

Perhaps not everyone today remembers just how magnetic that waltz was. Claudia Cardinale, alongside Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon as the young Tancredi, became the emotional center of Visconti’s great fresco on the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Angelica Sedara is perhaps the character that, more than any other, fixed her in the collective imagination.

And yet I had not even been born when Claudia played that role. For me, Claudia Cardinale remained Angelica. Even later, after discovering her extraordinary career and understanding that she had become one of the great stars of Italian and international cinema, her face still belonged to that luminous, proud, Mediterranean, untamable young woman.

This is why the upcoming Christie’s sale in Paris feels especially personal to me. Not only because it concerns a great actress, but because it allows us to approach a more intimate side of Claudia Cardinale: her passion for jewelry, her personal taste, her private choices.

Through jewelry, we come to know people. Not completely, of course. But sometimes more than we might expect. A jewel is never just an ornament. It is a decision. It is a fragment of identity. It is the way a woman chooses to present herself to the world, but also the way she preserves a part of herself.

Claudia Cardinale’s personal collection reveals a strong and coherent taste, deeply connected to her story. There is Italy, with Bvlgari and Buccellati. There is Rome: the Dolce Vita, Cinecittà, the warm glow of yellow gold, the power of cabochons, the sensuality of the serpent. There is Milan, with the artisanal refinement of Buccellati, metal worked like lace, Renaissance memory, and the culture of craftsmanship. And there is Paris, the France where Claudia lived for many years and where she passed away, with Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, and with Place Vendôme, a square that belongs to the history of European jewelry.

But there is something deeper as well. Claudia Cardinale was born in Tunis, in a city that was then a crossroads of cultures: Sicilian Italians, French, Jews, Arabs. That formation stayed with her. In her beauty, in her voice, in her independence, in her elegance, which was never domesticated. Her jewels, too, seem to reflect this inner geography: Mediterranean, Italian, French, free.

Among the most important pieces in the sale is a Bvlgari Serpenti bracelet-watch in enamel and sapphires, fitted with a manual movement and a dial signed Vacheron Constantin Genève. It is a jewel that fully belongs to the Bvlgari myth. But on Claudia Cardinale’s wrist, it takes on another meaning. It is not only a precious object. It is almost a self-portrait: sinuous, powerful, feminine, free.

Alongside the Serpenti, three Bvlgari rings reveal another dimension of her taste: a ruby of approximately 30 carats, a Trombino ring with an emerald, and a star sapphire ring. Important, strong stones, without a trace of timidity. Jewels that do not try to disappear, but instead affirm a presence. Just like Claudia.

The Buccellati pieces reveal another sensibility: more floral, more intricate, more closely tied to the Italian tradition of goldsmithing. Brooches in the shape of a rose, flowers in gold, diamonds, pearls, coral, and sapphires. And then a complete parure. These jewels speak of a different kind of femininity: perhaps less cinematic, but no less intense. A femininity made of details, artisanal memory, and love for the material.

Finally, there is the Paris of Place Vendôme: a gold powder compact signed Van Cleef & Arpels, several Cartier watches, including a Tank model. More discreet, more everyday objects, and for that very reason revealing. Not all the jewels of a diva need to be spectacular. Some belong to daily life, to private gestures, to the handbag, to the wrist, to the quiet routine of a woman.

And perhaps this is the most moving aspect of the sale. We are not looking at anonymous jewels, nor merely at lots with estimates. We are looking at objects that were chosen, worn, and kept. Objects that accompanied a woman in her real life, beyond cinema, beyond myth, beyond Angelica.

Christie’s will present this selection within its Joaillerie Paris online sale, from June 19 to 26. On June 22 in Paris, the sale will be accompanied by a conversation with Claudia Squitieri, the actress’s daughter; Violaine d’Astorg, Director of the Jewelry Department at Christie’s; Lucille Andreani, Director of Handbags & Accessories; and Aurore Renaut, Director of the European Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Media.

A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Claudia Cardinale Foundation, created with her daughter Claudia Squitieri to support contemporary audiovisual creation, with a particular focus on women artists. In this sense, the sale takes on a broader meaning: not only memory, but transmission.

Claudia Cardinale was many women: Angelica, Visconti’s muse, Fellini’s muse, an icon of the Dolce Vita, an international actress, a free woman, Mediterranean, Italian, and French at once. But through these jewels, she perhaps appears in her most intimate form: not as a character, but as a person.

I will always think of Claudia Cardinale as Angelica. Her entrance into the ballroom, her smile, her force, that beauty that seemed to announce a new world. But today, thanks to these jewels, I feel I can also glimpse another Claudia: more private, more everyday, closer.

And perhaps this is precisely the power of jewelry. It does not preserve only the value of matter. It preserves the warmth of a presence.

Iscriviti ora

He was an eclectic man, capable of playing seven instruments as an amateur — although, in truth, he was much more than an amateur. He belonged to that rare generation for whom music was not a specialization, but a natural language. He taught me opera before I could fully understand it. Or perhaps he taught me to understand it in the only way that matters at first: emotionally, physically, almost instinctively.

We Italians often say that opera is “ours.” It may sound possessive, but it is not only a matter of national pride. Opera, as we know it, begins with an Italian imagination: poetry, theater, music, voice, gesture, rhetoric, passion — with Metastasio and the long tradition that made the sung word a form of destiny.

Maria Callas - Turandot (Corbella archive)

I do not think there is an Italian of my generation who has not, at some point, loved opera or at least carried a few famous arias in memory. Even those who claim not to care for it have absorbed it somewhere: in a grandmother’s house, on television, at school, in a theater, in a film, in the collective memory of a country where melodrama has always been more than entertainment.

La Scala Opera House

For me, opera has never been only about the voice, although the voice remains the miracle. It is also about everything that prepares the voice before it arrives: the curtain, the orchestra pit, the darkened room, the silence before the first note, the costume, the gesture, the apparition of a woman who enters the stage already transformed into a queen, a priestess, a courtesan, a victim, a goddess, or a woman condemned by love and destiny.

And often, before she sings, there is a jewel.

Egyptian necklace, Maria Callas, Trissino (Vicenza), Marzotto Foundation Archive

This is why Dive e Gioielli in Scena. Corbella per Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas e le interpreti della lirica, curated by Paola Venturelli at the Museo del Gioiello in Vicenza, immediately spoke to me. Not because it is an exhibition about theatrical jewelry in the decorative sense, but because it touches one of the most secret parts of opera: the way an object can help a body become a role.

Headpiece in openwork gold metal, glass crystals, imitation pearls, made for the "The Pearl Fishers” by Georges Bizet and worn by soprano Margherita Carosio (Corbella archive)

It also follows another important moment of attention to this subject, Bijoux de scène de l’Opéra de Paris, presented at the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra at the Palais Garnier and organized by the Opéra national de Paris and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. That exhibition reminded us that stage jewels are not marginal ornaments. They tell us how power, seduction, fragility, exoticism, nobility, sacrifice, and illusion are made visible.

The Vicenza exhibition opens an Italian chapter of that same story. And for me, it is impossible to look at it without thinking of the particular intimacy Italians have with opera: not as something distant or museum-like, but as something that has passed through families, voices, living rooms, radios, records, theaters, and memories.

At the center is Corbella, the historic Milanese company founded in 1865 as the “Prima Fabbrica Italiana di Gioielli ed Armi per Teatro,” the first Italian factory of jewels and arms for the theater. Its history begins almost inside La Scala. Angelo Corbella worked there as a custodian and lived inside the theater with his family. By 1873, Corbella had established itself among the official suppliers of Teatro alla Scala. Later, the company would work for some of the most important opera houses in the world: La Fenice in Venice, Teatro Costanzi in Rome, and Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.

I like this beginning because it is not abstract. It is physical. A family living inside a theater. Children growing up near corridors, costumes, musicians, stage doors, rehearsals, voices. Before becoming an archive, a company, a name, Corbella was also this: proximity to the stage, to the practical machinery of wonder.

And the practical side matters.

Corbella was not only a workshop of fantasy. It was a Milanese family business, a place of deadlines, contracts, urgent productions, technical intelligence, and economic reality. According to the Corbella archive, the company remained a direct official supplier of La Scala until 1951; family memory recalls that the theater’s payment times had become too long and were no longer acceptable.

There is something strangely moving in that detail. Behind the splendor of opera there are always invoices. Behind the crown, there is the artisan. Behind the illusion, there is someone waiting to be paid.

Yet what Corbella produced was not ordinary illusion. It was the kind of illusion on which opera depends.

Tiara worn by Rosetta Pampanini for “Fedora” by Umberto Giordano, Corbella Archive

The pieces shown in Vicenza are made of theatrical materials: gilt metal, filigree, paste, rhinestones, and other elements shaped to respond to light, distance, movement, and character.

Tiara worn by Maria Callas for “Turandot” By Giacomo Puccini, Sartoria Arrigo

A crown was not simply a crown; it had to produce sovereignty under the lights. A necklace was not simply a necklace; it had to help a body become Cleopatra, Aida, Fedora, Butterfly, Turandot. A tiara, a headpiece, a hair ornament could change the entire temperature of an entrance. Theatrical jewelry lives in this strange and fascinating ambiguity: it is material, but its function is transformation.

The exhibition brings together names that belong not only to opera history, but to an emotional geography: Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Rosetta Pampanini, Margherita Carosio, Margherita Cipolato Nicolai, Maria Caniglia, Giulietta Simionato. Each name carries a sound, a temperament, a mythology.

Among the works on display are a polychrome Egyptian-style necklace that belonged to Maria Callas, a diadem connected to Fedora by Umberto Giordano, the headpiece for Leila in Les Pêcheurs de Perles, hair ornaments created for Madama Butterfly, and the spectacular crown with tremblant elements linked to Puccini’s Turandot, first staged at La Scala on April 25, 1926.

The exhibition at the “Museo del Gioiello” in Vicenza also includes documents from the Tullio Serafin Historical Archive: a handwritten letter from Maria Callas to Maestro Tullio Serafin and an original score of Turandot used by Serafin for Callas’s 1957 recording at Teatro alla Scala.

Tullio Serafin, born in Rottanova di Cavarzere in 1878 and deceased in Rome in 1968, was one of the great Italian conductors of the twentieth century. But in the history of Callas, he was more than a conductor. He was one of the decisive figures who recognized, guided, and shaped her genius. To read a letter from Callas to Serafin is not to read a celebrity document. It is to enter a private corridor between the artist and one of the men who understood her before the world fully turned her into a myth.

The letter, written from Paris in 1967, is brief, but deeply human. From the displayed manuscript, it reads:

Caro Maestro —
come sta? Tante volte
è nella mia mente —

Vorrei passare da Roma
e così rivederla quest’inverno.
Sto riprendendo il lavoro
ma con calma, non essendo
un fisico forte come più
giovane! Non ero mai tanto
forte — Avevo volontà tanta
e fede come dice nella sua
dedica. Ma la vita logora.

Mi scriva se può, o mi
faccia scrivere sue nuove —

Sono sua affettuosamente
tanto.

Maria

In English:

Dear Maestro,
how are you? So often
you are in my thoughts —

I would like to pass through Rome
and thus see you again this winter.
I am returning to work,
but calmly, as I no longer have
the strong physique I had when I was
younger! I was never very
strong — I had great will
and faith, as you say in your
dedication. But life wears one down.

Write to me if you can, or
have someone send me news of you —

I am yours, very affectionately.

Maria

That sentence — Ma la vita logora, “But life wears one down” — changes the atmosphere of the entire exhibition.

Suddenly, the Divina becomes Maria. A woman who had given her body to music and understood that the body eventually asks to be paid back.

This is why the encounter between the jewels, the letter, and the Turandot score is so powerful. The jewels give us the apparition. The score reminds us of the discipline behind the apparition. The letter gives us the wound.

Opera has always lived in this tension: public splendor and private exhaustion, technique and abandon, discipline and danger. A crown may tremble under the stage lights, but the woman beneath it is mortal. A diadem may make a soprano appear untouchable, but the voice comes from the body, and the body suffers.

The exhibition also includes fabrics by the historic Venetian house Rubelli.

Rubelli fabric

There is something profoundly Italian in this story: the alliance between “bottega” and theater, craft and music, ornament and emotion. Corbella reminds us of an Italy capable of making fantasy with discipline and illusion with intelligence.

A fake crown can express sovereignty better than a real one, if the stage believes in it. A glass stone can travel farther than a diamond, if it catches the right light. A jewel with little material value can become priceless if it has taken part in the construction of a legend.

This is what moved me most: the sense that these objects had survived the voices.

The voice, by nature, disappears. The jewel remains. The letter remains. The score remains. The fabric remains. The archive remains.

But they do not replace the voice.

They remember it.

The project, entitled Panthère Noire / Jewels from a Feline Bestiary, opened in Milan on May 21 and, after its Roman chapter, will finally travel to Florence, where it will be presented at the Loggia Rucellai.

Visitors are welcomed by two large life-size black panthers in bronze, designed by Giovanni Raspini and created using the lost-wax casting technique by sculptor Lucio Minigrilli. Head model maker Erika Corsi created the jewels that adorn the felines’ necks and paws: necklaces and bracelets that transform the sculptures into true guardian presences. From the very beginning, the project makes its nature clear: the jewel is not only ornament, but also stage, body and, above all, narrative.

The collection includes 28 High Jewelry creations in silver, bronze and gemstones: 22 unique pieces and six jewels grouped into two parures intended for sale. Panthers, tigers, leopards, lions and cheetahs are the undisputed protagonists of the exhibition. They emerge through feline protomes, fangs, claws, whiskers, fur-like textures, vegetal and floral decorations, colored stones and pearls.

The starting point is not merely the preciousness of the gem, but the physical presence of the jewel itself. Giovanni Raspini treats metal as a living material: he shapes it, darkens it, loads it with chiaroscuro. The lost-wax technique allows the felines to take on full, plastic, almost sculptural forms. In this sense, Panthère Noire belongs more to the territory of jewelry-sculpture than to that of purely decorative animalier.

The necklace that gives the exhibition its title concentrates this vision into an image of striking intensity. Made of burnished white bronze and enamelled bronze, with large black onyx gems and feathers in the same shade, Panthère Noire features a panther’s head at the center, seen in close-up. Everything is built around a deep black: mystery, matter and power.

The Tigre necklace, by contrast, carries the narrative into a tropical forest. The great feline lies at the center of the composition, surrounded by vegetal elements and small monkeys climbing among the leaves. Burnished bronze, burnished white bronze, hydrothermal quartz, moss agate and mother-of-pearl create a three-dimensional landscape, a true sculpted scene to be worn.

More rarefied in atmosphere is the Snow Leopard necklace, where a snow leopard rests on a bed of ice, rendered through luminous rock crystal quartz. Here, the predator loses any overt aggressiveness and becomes a silent vision, immersed in a cold, mineral light.

In Black and Gold, two felines face one another in a play of opposites: one light and golden, the other grey and darker, resting on rock crystal quartz and alternating with vegetal elements.

Alongside the unique pieces, Giovanni Raspini introduces a new element: two reproducible and purchasable parures, directly inspired by the universe of the exhibition. Panthère Mirage Blue includes a necklace and bracelet in 18-carat gold-plated bronze, with a panther stretched across a pavé of gemstones in shades of blue, sky blue and aquamarine. Leopardo Jungle, meanwhile, brings together a necklace, earrings, ring and bracelet in burnished silver, featuring a leopard with a sculptural texture immersed in tropical flora, among gemstones ranging from green to antique pink and freshwater pearls.

At the origin of this imaginary world lies an ancient memory. Giovanni Raspini recalls being struck, years ago, by a Hittite gold bracelet seen at the museum in Ankara: two leonine protomes joined by a semicircle, a form at once simple and astonishingly modern. It is an image that perfectly sums up the long relationship between jewel and feline, between ornament and symbol, between beauty and apotropaic power.

The project is also accompanied by the volume Panthère Noire, published by Edifir / Edizioni Firenze. It signals the desire to give the exhibition a broader dimension: not merely a presentation of jewels, but the construction of a contemporary bestiary, suspended between material culture, craftsmanship and imagination.

With Panthère Noire, Giovanni Raspini chooses a luxury of presence: made of weight, shadow, volume, gesture and storytelling. A universe in which the feline is not domesticated by the jewel, but preserves its most seductive ambiguity: elegance and instinct, beauty and threat, ornament and power.

Laura Astrologo Porché
@journaldesbijoux

For me, the real heart of GemGenève has long been its exhibition.

Bowl. Presented at the 1930 Venice Biennale. Malachite, pearl, silver enamel peacock with a pearl crest, wooden base. Courtesy Nicolas Torroni

Perhaps it comes from my deep attraction to art and material culture, but every year I find myself waiting for the exhibition with almost more anticipation than the fair itself. It is there that GemGenève becomes something more than a jewelry salon. The pace changes. One stops looking only at jewels and begins looking at objects, surfaces, materials, techniques, and histories.

This year’s exhibition, Shaping Matter, Enhancing Beauty, conceived under the direction of Mathieu Dekeukelaire, was particularly successful both for the quality of the pieces assembled and for the theme it explored: the relationship between matter and the human hand that transforms it.

Mathieu Dekeukelaire

Gathering more than one hundred works from institutional and private collections, the exhibition moved fluidly between Chinese imperial jade carvings, hardstone objects, cameos, Art Deco vanity cases and nécessaires, coral works, horn, amber, agate, ivory, lacquer, tortoiseshell, rock crystal, malachite, lapis lazuli, and nephrite vessels. The selection was remarkably rich without ever feeling overloaded, because the exhibition was held together by a very clear idea: observing how materials become artistic expression through technique, patience, and craftsmanship.

Vase in nephrite Fondation Baur

One of the strongest sections was undoubtedly the presentation of jade works from the Baur Foundation, currently closed for renovation and exceptionally present at GemGenève this year with nearly forty objects. The imperial nephrite bowls, brush pots, and ritual-inspired vessels possessed an extraordinary refinement. Some surfaces seemed almost immaterial, with decorations emerging softly from the stone rather than being imposed upon it.

Pauline d’Abrigeon, curator of Chinese collections at the Baur Foundation and co-curator of the exhibition, explained that jade was central to the exhibition because of the technical complexity involved in working such a hard material. Looking at these objects, one understands immediately what she means. The beauty of jade carving lies partly in restraint — in the ability to achieve delicacy through an extremely slow and demanding process.

But what made the exhibition particularly interesting was that it never limited itself to jade alone.

An Art Deco vanity case from the Faerber Collection combined black lacquer, moonstone, onyx, rock crystal, lapis lazuli, sapphires, and diamonds in an extraordinary composition that blurred the line between jewelry and decorative art. Elsewhere, engraved agates, coral objects, lacquered surfaces, and tortoiseshell works revealed entirely different technical vocabularies and relationships to matter.

I was also fascinated by the malachite cup presented by Nicolas Torroni, originally exhibited at the 1930 Venice Biennale, with its enamelled silver peacock rising from the stone. It perfectly embodied the spirit of the exhibition: objects situated somewhere between sculpture, jewelry, decorative arts, and mineral culture.

Another aspect I particularly appreciated was the decision to integrate live demonstrations and métiers d’art practitioners into the exhibition itself. Watching lapidary sculptor Hervé Obligi discuss hardstone marquetry or restorer Ulli Freyer explain tortoiseshell and Boulle techniques added an entirely different layer to the experience. These moments reminded visitors that behind every polished object lies an immense amount of technical knowledge, repetition, gesture, and manual intelligence.

What I increasingly appreciate about GemGenève is precisely this ability to create connections between jewelry, decorative arts, craftsmanship, restoration, gemology, and museums without forcing those worlds apart.

And perhaps that is why, after eight editions, the exhibition remains for me the moment where the fair reveals its deepest identity.

At Milan Design Week 2026, where scenography often risks becoming an end in itself, Buccellati takes a more complex path. Aquae Mirabiles, curated by Federica Sala and conceived with Balich Wonder Studio, with the unmistakable hand of Luke Edward Hall, does not simply construct an atmosphere. It attempts something more fragile and far more difficult: to turn material into narrative without ever losing its density.

Luca Buccellati and Laura Astrologo Porché

I had the opportunity to experience the installation in a special preview with the Buccellati family, a context that made its underlying logic even more perceptible. Removed from the usual flow and noise of Design Week, the project revealed itself less as an immersive spectacle and more as a controlled environment, one that asks to be read slowly.

What emerges is not a set but a structure of thought. A contemporary nymphaeum, yes, but one that avoids the trap of quotation. The façade, with its aquamarine tonality and its rhythm of niches inhabited by mythological figures, immediately situates the viewer in a suspended register, somewhere between Roman memory and a more fluid, almost dreamlike temporality. It is not nostalgia. It is a controlled displacement.

And yet, what interests me here is not the mythology itself, but the way it is used as a threshold. You pass through Neptune and the Naiads almost quickly, as if they were necessary but not central, before finding yourself drawn into something more abstract, a space where depth becomes the real subject. Silver sturgeons surface from dark, almost mineral textures. Light is softened, refracted, absorbed. The installation begins to operate less as an image and more as a condition. You are not looking at water, you are inside a system that behaves like it.

The central room crystallizes this shift. The banquet, inevitable given the theme, could easily have fallen into excess. Instead, it holds. The wave shaped table, carrying the full Caviar collection, is undeniably opulent, but never static. It reads as a surface in motion. Blues, turquoise, emerald tones are not decorative choices. They function as a chromatic grammar that stabilizes the space while allowing the objects to vibrate within it.

Along the walls, Luke Edward Hall traces an allegorical narrative of caviar in Italy, from Roman antiquity to papal tables, through Renaissance echoes and the Milanese imagination of Ludovico il Moro. But again, the storytelling never insists on itself. It remains deliberately light, almost secondary, as if aware that the real discourse is happening elsewhere.

Because it is.

The real center of gravity lies in Buccellati’s material language. The microsphere motif of the Caviar collection, so often reduced to a signature, reveals here its full conceptual potential. Seen at scale, repeated, expanded into space, it ceases to be ornament. It becomes a system, a way of thinking about surface, about light, about the tension between control and irregularity.

Each sphere, hand applied, captures and releases light differently. The result is not texture in the decorative sense, but a form of visual respiration. Silver is no longer a passive support. It becomes unstable, almost alive. And this is where the reference to caviar shifts from metaphor to structure. It is not about resemblance. It is about translation.

This is not new in Buccellati’s history. One immediately thinks of the Cratere delle Muse from 1981 by Gianmaria Buccellati, where the same principle, multiplication, density, surface tension, was already pushing the Maison beyond representation. But here, the logic is extended into space. The installation itself becomes the object.

What Aquae Mirabiles ultimately proposes is a quiet but precise idea: that luxury, at its highest level, is not narrative, nor even craftsmanship taken in isolation. It is coherence. The ability to construct a language where story, technique, and material are no longer separate layers, but a single continuous surface.

And in that sense, what Buccellati achieves here is something rare during Design Week.

Not spectacle.

But consistency.

Iscriviti ora

This year’s Designers’ Village (7–10 May 2026) confirms exactly that: not a rupture, but a deepening. And for me, it is also something more personal. I realize I know most of the designers, some from their early beginnings, others through years of encounters between Geneva, Paris, Milan, and many other countries.

One of my first stops will inevitably be A.win Siu, whom I have known for many years now. We have been crossing paths at GemGenève long enough that her presence has become a kind of constant for me. There has always been, in her approach, a distinctly joyful undercurrent—an ability to keep a sense of wonder intact, even as her pieces grow more complex.

This year, she leans even more openly into that joyful dimension. One of her key brooches is inspired by a gacha capsule toy machine: instead of a toy, what emerges is a “hidden candy,” wrapped in what she describes as a kind of cosmic sweetness—something that might be tucked inside a nebula or waiting quietly along our path. It is a poetic way of saying that the world is more generous than we think, that moments of grace are already there, if only we slow down enough to notice them.

The piece itself, crafted in titanium, enamel, Paraíba tourmaline, Burmese sapphire, ruby, spinel and diamonds, translates that idea materially. Not as spectacle, but as a quiet invitation: sweetness does not announce itself, it reveals itself.

A.Win.Siu Brooch 2026

Richard Wu will also be a familiar presence. He is not new to GemGenève, and that continuity matters. There is a different kind of confidence when a designer returns, a way of inhabiting the space that is less about proving and more about refining.

“I made a lot of friends when I first exhibited at GemGenève… the tenth edition will feel like a reunion party for me.”

His work, rooted in jade carving and enriched by Italian goldsmithing techniques, reflects that openness. It is precise, but never closed. I am curious to see how this sense of dialogue will translate into his new pieces this year.

Richard Wu - Nirvana rings

With Marine Billet of Incarnem, the connection goes back to Paris. I have followed her work from early on, when the idea of imprint and material memory was already central.

“It is an opportunity for me to engage with distinguished jewelers from across the globe and share my passion with a wider audience.”

Since then, her language has become more assertive. The notion of jewelry as a “second skin” is no longer exploratory. It feels grounded, almost inevitable. I am looking forward to seeing how far she pushes this idea in Geneva.

Incarnem - jeweled glove

Mike Joseph is another trajectory I have followed over time. Armenian, and coming from a lineage of jewelers, he was immersed in gemstones from an early age, a background that still informs the way he approaches material today. I first encountered his work at the Roma Jewelry Week and then within the framework of the Armenian Jewellers Association. Founder of his eponymous brand in 2015, he brings over two decades of experience shaped through extensive apprenticeships across different cities and ateliers. That formation is visible in his precision, but also in the way he navigates between tradition and experimentation.

What interests me now, ahead of GemGenève, is how this balance continues to evolve. His language remains rooted in gold and diamonds, yet increasingly open to more contemporary materials. The result is a body of work that does not reject heritage, but stretches it, quietly pushing its limits without ever breaking its coherence.

Mike Joseph - Dune collection, 18K gold, diamonds and wood

Sebastián Plah is based in Milan and I have known him since his student years, which inevitably changes the way I look at his work today.

His intention remains the same, to create jewelry that makes the wearer feel “self-assured, joyful and empowered.”

But there is now more control behind that intention. The lightness is still there, but it feels deliberate. Seeing his work at GemGenève will be a way of measuring that evolution.

Sebastián Plah, lightweight jewels

At Hemera Paris, the approach is more measured, almost strategic.

“GemGenève will be the very first exhibition ever for Hemera Paris… a highly symbolic step for us after having launched and grown the brand very quietly.”

That sense of timing is interesting. In a context where visibility is often immediate, choosing when to appear becomes part of the narrative. I am curious to see how this translates in the physical space.

Hemera Paris - Aube, unique piece, Nilus crocodilus, 18k yellow gold, sapphires and natural diamonds

Jaqueline Powers brings the focus back to wearability.

“Bold creations that are also designed to be comfortable to wear.”

It is a simple statement, but an important one. Expression is not enough if the piece does not live on the body.

Jacqueline Powers - Mineralogy collection

Finally, Be Liza, with her idea of jewelry as everyday armour. The reference is clear, but what interests me is how it translates in practice. Protection, identity, construction of the self. These are strong themes, and I am curious to see how they will materialise in Geneva.

Be Liza - ring

Coming back to GemGenève, edition after edition, shifts your perspective.

You no longer see isolated designers. You see trajectories. You recognise gestures, evolutions, hesitations, confirmations.

The Designers’ Village is not about emerging talent in the conventional sense. It’s not interesting because it is new.
But because it is true.

The project reflects the vision with which Maria Cristina Squarcialupi, President of UNOAERRE Industries, approaches this anniversary: not simply as a corporate milestone, but as an opportunity to frame gold within a wider cultural and symbolic dimension, where technical expertise, history, and imagination intersect.

Maria Cristina Squarcialupi and Felice Limosani

“Commemorating UNOAERRE’s one hundred years means reflecting on our history and on the vision that has guided the company since its foundation: innovation, a culture of making, and openness to the world. Stardust by Felice Limosani is the ideal work through which to express gold not only as a precious material or a manufacturing tradition, but as an element that connects us to the history of the universe. It is a way of reminding us that behind the daily work of goldsmithing there is also a broader dimension, shaped by time, knowledge, and wonder,” said Squarcialupi.

What makes the project particularly compelling is its attempt to move gold away from its most immediate associations. Here, the metal is not presented as value, ornament, or status symbol, but as primordial matter — the residue of a cosmic event that predates by billions of years any notion of craftsmanship, luxury, or commerce.

Limosani develops this idea through an environment of projections, sound, and text, deliberately avoiding a purely didactic or illustrative approach. Instead, Stardust unfolds through abstraction, suspended temporality, and a form of immersion designed not simply to impress, but to recalibrate perception. This is where the installation is most effective: not when it explains gold, but when it invites the viewer to experience it as energy, light, and transformation.

In this sense, UNOAERRE’s centenary becomes an opportunity to symbolically redefine the material at the heart of its identity. By entrusting the telling of an industrial legacy to an artistic and immersive language, the company opens a broader reflection on time, matter, and the relationship between manufacture and knowledge.

UNOAERRE – Stardust, by Felice Limosani
Palazzo della Fraternita dei Laici, Piazza Grande, Arezzo
May 9 – June 8, 2026

Laura Astrologo Porché
@journaldesbijoux

In the rich landscape of jewelry publishing, beautifully illustrated volumes are abundant. What is far less common is a book that moves beyond the finished jewel to examine the human relationships behind its creation, evolution, and longevity. Jewelry Creators: Dynamic Duos and Generational Gems, published by ACC Art Books for Spring 2026 and authored by Beth Bernstein and Sonia Esther Soltani, distinguishes itself through precisely this lens: an exploration of jewelry through the partnerships, family ties, and generational exchanges that shape both creative identity and business continuity.

Structured in two sections, the volume offers a dual perspective on collaboration and inheritance within the jewelry world. The first chapter, Dynamic Duos, focuses on creative and professional pairings such as siblings, spouses, parents and children, as well as longstanding friends and collaborators, whose shared vision has helped define distinctive jewelry languages. The second, Generational Gems, turns to houses and designers for whom jewelry is not only a profession, but a legacy handed down over time, along with technical knowledge, gemstone expertise, aesthetic sensibility, and the capacity to reinterpret heritage for a changing market.

Rather than presenting a straightforward sequence of profiles, Bernstein and Soltani construct a broader reading of the industry through the prism of relationships. In their narrative, jewelry is not simply an artistic expression or luxury commodity, but part of a wider ecosystem shaped by trust, dialogue, complementarity, and continuity. The book suggests that behind many successful jewelry brands lies not a solitary vision, but an ongoing exchange between individuals, generations, and disciplines.

Lalalounis bracelet

The selection of featured names underscores this approach. Lalaounis, Selim Mouzannar, Monica Rich Kosann, Jade Trau, Sorellina, Sethi Couture, Single Stone, Lord Jewelry, Julius Klein, and Walters Faith appear alongside independent designers, gemstone professionals, and established houses whose stories reveal different models of collaboration and succession. What connects them is not a shared aesthetic, but a common ability to balance inheritance with innovation, and personal authorship with collective dialogue.

Lionheart

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its narrative texture. Beyond the imagery, it brings forward anecdotes, little-known episodes, family trajectories, and pivotal moments that illuminate the less visible structures of the jewelry industry. In doing so, it offers a more nuanced understanding of how creative legacies are built; not in isolation, but through relationships that sustain both vision and resilience over time.

Sorellina

What ultimately emerges is a key insight into the jewelry world itself: continuity and innovation are rarely opposing forces. More often, they are the product of exchange between generations, between partners, and between tradition and reinvention.

In that sense, Jewelry Creators: Dynamic Duos and Generational Gems is not only a tribute to the people behind the jewels, but also a reflection on the collaborative nature of creativity in contemporary jewelry.

Laura Astrologo Porché
@journaldesbijoux

Buccellati’s latest initiative, “Share Your Memories,” is more interesting because it moves in the opposite direction. Instead of treating heritage as something sealed inside the brand, it opens the archive outward; toward the people who have actually lived with its jewelry.

The premise is simple. Buccellati is inviting long-time clients and admirers of the House to share not only pieces they own, but also the personal memories attached to them. The result is not just a catalog of precious objects, but something closer to a living archive: a record of how jewelry travels through private lives, across generations, and into family mythology.

That distinction matters. In the luxury sector, archives often function as proof of legitimacy. They certify pedigree. What Buccellati seems to be suggesting instead is that an archive can also hold emotion—that the history of a jewelry house is not only the story of what it made, but of how those objects were worn, remembered, commissioned, gifted, and loved.

In Buccellati’s case, this idea is consistent with the brand’s long-standing relationship to preservation. Since the beginning, the House has framed its work not simply as production, but as stewardship: of artisanal techniques, aesthetic codes, and cultural memory. Mario Buccellati understood the value of protecting traditional goldsmithing methods; later, Lorenzo and Gianmaria Buccellati recognized the importance of formalizing an archive that could hold together the company’s visual and historical identity.

Gianmaria Buccellati

With “Share Your Memories,” that archival logic expands again. It now includes not just documents and designs, but testimony.

And one of the most compelling testimonies to emerge from the project is that of Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.

For audiences outside Japan, Kuroyanagi may require introduction, but in Japan she is an institution: television host, bestselling author, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and one of the country’s most enduring cultural figures. She is best known as the host of “Tetsuko’s Room,” the longest-running talk show in Japanese television history, now marking its fiftieth anniversary. Her memoir, “Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window,” became an international phenomenon and remains one of the most beloved Japanese books of the postwar era.

She is exactly the kind of figure who makes sense in a project like this—not because she adds celebrity value, but because her relationship to the brand appears to have genuine historical depth.

Buccellati’s ties to Japan go back decades. In the early 1970s, Gianmaria Buccellati opened the House’s first commercial space in Tokyo through the luxury retailer Wako, an early move that helped establish the brand’s presence in a market uniquely receptive to craftsmanship, detail, and refinement. Over time, that commercial relationship evolved into something more textured: a cultural affinity between the Buccellati aesthetic and a Japanese public attuned to nuance and artistry.

Kuroyanagi became part of that story. A long-time client and admirer of the House, she frequently wore Buccellati jewelry on television, integrating the pieces into a public image defined not by trendiness, but by personal style and consistency. That matters more than it sounds. Luxury visibility is often bought, staged, or campaign-driven. What gives this story its interest is that Kuroyanagi’s relationship with Buccellati seems to have developed through use, repetition, and attachment.

According to the House, archival research brought to light old orders, original sketches, and even an image from a Japanese television interview in the 1980s featuring Gianmaria Buccellati and Kuroyanagi. In the new chapter of “Share Your Memories,” Maria Cristina Buccellati revisits that connection with her, reconstructing a relationship built over decades.

The jewelry itself is part of the appeal, of course. Among the pieces highlighted are a Cardo brooch in yellow gold, the eternelle “Tulle” rings in white gold and diamonds, and a special bespoke commission placed through the Rome boutique. These are not incidental accessories in the story; they are the physical anchors of it. Each piece points to a moment of taste, a decision, a context, a life being lived around the object.

That is ultimately what Buccellati seems to understand very well: jewelry is never only formal. Even the most technically accomplished high jewelry acquires its real significance later, once it enters biography. It becomes associated with a marriage, a career, a television appearance, a gift, a mother, a daughter, a city, a season, a version of oneself.

In that sense, “Share Your Memories” is not really about nostalgia. It is about authorship.

Who gets to write the history of a luxury house? Usually, the answer is obvious: the founders, the family, the creative directors, the archive department, the marketing team. Buccellati is making a subtler proposition—that clients, too, are authors of brand history. Not in the contemporary consumer-engagement sense, but in a more durable one. They give objects their second life, and often their deepest meaning.

There is also something smart here from an editorial standpoint. At a time when so much luxury communication feels flattened by sameness—campaign language, heritage clichés, algorithm-friendly storytelling—anchoring a brand narrative in specific human memory gives it texture. It restores scale. It makes beauty legible again through lived experience.

And this may be especially true for Buccellati, whose appeal has always depended on intimacy as much as spectacle. Its techniques are intricate, tactile, and often best appreciated up close. Its jewelry does not merely announce itself; it rewards attention. A project built around memory, private histories, and long-term attachment feels unusually well matched to that DNA.

Kuroyanagi’s story works because it embodies all of this at once: continuity, elegance, cultural crossing, personal loyalty, and the long afterlife of beautiful objects.

For Buccellati, that is the deeper message of the archive. Heritage is not just what survives in vitrines or in family records. It is what remains alive in people’s memories and what returns, decades later, with even more meaning attached.

Installed within the historic salons overlooking the Place de la Concorde, the exhibition acquires particular resonance. The Hôtel de la Marine was originally conceived in the eighteenth century to safeguard the Crown’s most valuable possessions, including the royal jewels of France, making this presentation a return to the building’s original vocation. More than one hundred exceptional pieces are displayed, many shown in France for the first time, drawn from major institutional and private collections. These jewels are not presented merely as ornaments, but as historical artefacts that once functioned as instruments of political authority, diplomatic representation, dynastic continuity, and personal devotion.

The exhibition opens with legendary gemstones: diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds of remarkable size and provenance, that demonstrate how rarity itself became a form of power. Often displayed unmounted, these stones reveal the raw material foundations of sovereignty and the symbolic weight attributed to exceptional natural resources. The narrative then moves to the great age of the tiara, where monumental creations from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrate the codified visual language of European courts. Works by houses such as Cartier and Chaumet reflect the evolution of courtly style from Napoleonic grandeur to Belle Époque opulence and the geometric clarity of Art Deco.

At the heart of the exhibition are jewels transmitted across generations, bearing witness to the intimate connection between power and inheritance.

Pieces associated with figures such as Catherine the Great, Joséphine Bonaparte, and Queen Victoria reveal how jewellery embodied both state authority and personal sentiment. Particularly striking are jewels designed by Prince Albert for Queen Victoria, in which political symbolism and emotional meaning are inseparably intertwined. In these objects, affection becomes a matter of dynasty, and intimacy becomes part of public representation.

The final section traces the fate of royal jewellery in the twentieth century, as the collapse of empires and the end of absolute monarchies dispersed historic treasures into new hands. Industrialists, collectors, and maharajas emerge as new custodians of objects once reserved for sovereigns, while jewellery adapts to modern notions of luxury without losing its symbolic charge. Recent press coverage has also drawn attention to the absence of certain French Crown Jewels initially expected to be displayed, withdrawn following contemporary security concerns—an absence that subtly reinforces one of the exhibition’s underlying themes: the fragility of power, even when embodied in the hardest and most enduring materials.

Ultimately, Dynastic Jewels succeeds not through spectacle alone, but through meaning. By situating jewelry within architecture, history, and lineage, the exhibition transcends aesthetics and becomes a meditation on how power is made visible, how it is transmitted, and how it survives long after the courts that once gave it life have disappeared.

Freely translated from my article published on Italian Magazine Roma Exclusive HERE

This monograph presents the work of this modern artist—sculptor, draftsman, philosopher, as well as goldsmith and jeweler. Brush was never interested in ornament as social signal. Gold, steel, aluminum, diamonds: these were not hierarchies of value for him, but variables in an ongoing experiment. His work treats jewelry as a philosophical object: something that interrogates weight, repetition, balance, reflection, and the way light behaves when disciplined by line.

Unlike many artists who pass through jewelry on their way to “fine art,” Brush moved in the opposite direction. Painting, sculpture, metallurgy, optics, mechanics: all converged toward the intimate scale of the body. Rings become systems. Cuffs become architectures. Surfaces behave like landscapes, rippling under light as if time itself were engraved into metal.

One of the most striking aspects of the exhibition is how quiet the work feels. There is no decorative excess, no seduction through sparkle. Even diamonds appear restrained, almost analytical. In pieces like Rings of Infinity, repetition becomes meditation: circles turning in on themselves, suggesting continuity without climax. In works such as Thinking About Monet, steel carries color not through pigment, but through the physics of light interacting with meticulously worked surfaces.

Brush’s practice was inseparable from his tools. In his Manhattan studio, antique ornamental lathes, machines once used for scientific instruments and currency engraving, became collaborators. Precision was not an aesthetic choice; it was an ethical one. Every line mattered because every line altered how light would move, fracture, or pause.

What emerges across the exhibition is a radical repositioning of jewelry’s purpose. These objects do not flatter the body; they converse with it. They resist fashion cycles, gender coding, and symbolic shortcuts. Wearing them feels less like decoration and more like participation in a thought process that continues beyond the artist’s hand.

That may be Daniel Brush’s most enduring contribution: he proved that jewelry can be slow, demanding, and intellectually rigorous—without losing its physical presence or emotional gravity. In an era obsessed with immediacy and spectacle, his work insists on attention.

The Art of Line and Light is not a retrospective designed to summarize a career. It is an environment—almost a laboratory—where viewers are invited to experience what happens when art, science, and philosophy collapse into objects small enough to hold, yet complex enough to resist easy understanding.

This is jewelry that does not ask to be admired.
It asks to be thought with.

From June 8th to October 4th, 2026 L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts supported by Van Cleef & Arpels Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau, 16 bis boulevard Montmartre, Paris 9e
Free admission, upon registration