Chaumet built its new high jewellery around a spice cupboard. Tea fields, vanilla pods, saffron and cinnamon set the terms for forty-six pieces. The maison calls it A Journey Through Nature.
The collection landed during Paris couture week, when the jewellery houses show alongside the couturiers. Chaumet took its guests out of the city to the Abbaye des Vaux-de-Cernay, a former monastery southwest of Paris. Song Hye Kyo, Li Bingbing and Sophie Marceau sat beneath the vaulted refectory. The stones came out against stone.
High jewellery is shown, not walked. There are no models on a runway, only necklaces on busts and stands, brought out for editors and clients to read up close. Chaumet used the abbey's proportions to slow the looking. A room that once fed monks framed emeralds instead.
The premise
Chaumet has drawn on plants since the eighteenth century, and it went back to the garden with a specific brief. The forty-six pieces trace ingredients that travel: green tea, coffee, saffron, vanilla, cinnamon, star anise, peppercorns and mint. Each began as a plant and reached the table as a flavour. The collection follows that route from field to cup.
The pieces read in three movements. One holds the cool of early leaves and fresh water. One turns to spice and sweetness. The last settles into warmth, the amber end of an afternoon. Colour does the sorting.
In the case
Tea Field sets Colombian emeralds into white gold and diamonds, its lines pulled from terraced hills and running water. Vanilla Flower keeps to white gold and diamonds, built around a single opened bloom. Saffron Flower pairs yellow diamonds with enamel fired in the maison's workshops. Coffee Aroma goes deeper, blue sapphires and pavé diamonds banked into a dark ground.
Cinnamon Bark curls into rounded, resinous forms in warm-toned stones. Across the set the gem list runs long: emeralds, sapphires, aquamarines, rubellites, tourmalines, garnets, pearls and diamonds, worked in white and yellow gold. Grand feu enamel carries the colours that the stones cannot.
Several of the necklaces come apart. A pendant lifts off to become a brooch; a section of a collar detaches into a bracelet. Chaumet has long built its jewels to change shape, a practical inheritance from a time when a piece had to earn its keep across a whole wardrobe. The mechanism stays hidden. The change looks like sleight of hand.
A house that once tied wheat into tiaras now reaches for the spice route.
The Splendid EditThe archive
Chaumet has a naturalist habit older than most of its rivals. Marie-Etienne Nitot opened the maison in 1780 and dressed the Napoleonic court; the wheat-ear tiara, all movement and no visible clasp, became a signature. Ears of corn, laurel, ferns and lily of the valley fill the drawings kept at 12 Place Vendome. The new pieces read as the next entry in that ledger rather than a break from it.
The naturalist school it belongs to ran right through the nineteenth century, when jewellers pressed real leaves and petals into service as models. Chaumet's version favoured wheat and wildflowers over anything exotic. A Journey Through Nature widens that vocabulary to the pantry, then treats coffee and pepper with the seriousness once reserved for the rose.
Courtesy of Chaumet — A Journey Through Nature, Paris
The presentation made the point in pairs. Each new necklace stood beside an older one, a 2026 design set against a diamond cascade from 1905, a fresh floral bloom answered by a piece from 1984. The century between them narrowed to a matter of stones and setting.
The studio
This is the first collection conceived entirely under Olga Corsini, who runs the creative studio. The through-line held: botanical subjects, movement built into the metal, colour used with intent. Continuity was the aim rather than reinvention. The house voice stayed recognisable across all forty-six.
The timing matters. High jewellery has become the steadier half of the luxury business, less exposed to fashion's swings, and the maisons have leaned into it. Chaumet sits inside LVMH's watches and jewellery arm, smaller than Bulgari and Tiffany, older than both. A collection like this is how it argues its place.
What holds
Paris jewellery weeks tend toward the abstract, the theme stretched until it vanishes. Chaumet kept its subject close enough to name. A necklace can be a tea field or a vanilla flower and still be a necklace you could clasp.
The garden holds. Nitot's wheat still grows somewhere in the DNA, and the saffron and star anise sit next to it without apology. The diamonds do the talking. The plants gave them something to say.
The Splendid Edit on Chaumet's A Journey Through Nature high jewellery collection, unveiled during Paris couture week. Details from Chaumet and LVMH.
Photography courtesy of Chaumet — A Journey Through Nature, Paris