Five necklaces that stole the show at the jewellery fair

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival—Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding, George Clooney collecting a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement — closed on the Lido di Venezia within days of Vicenzaoro opening in Palladio’s Renaissance city, Vicenza. The overlap was not incidental. The jewellers on Vicenzaoro’s Icon floor are, increasingly, the people dressing those red carpets.

This time the connection turned literal: Georgina Rodríguez wore Pasquale Bruni’s Giardini Segreti Couture collier to the premiere of Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?; Chiara Mastroianni wore Roberto Coin’s latest Cobra. The fair closed with 1,300 exhibiting brands and a record 910 hosted buyers in attendance.

Five necklaces from the fair make the point on their own — Italian high jewellery, right now, is working at the very top of its register.

Pasquale Bruni
Giardini Segreti Couture

Pasquale Bruni returned to Vicenzaoro this September after an absence of a decade, and the Giardini Segreti Couture necklace — Secret Gardens, in translation — arrives with the quiet confidence of designer Eugenia Bruni, who knows exactly what she does and has no interest in doing anything else. The piece is constructed from magnolia and lotus petals in white gold, each individually set in white diamonds so densely laid that the gold beneath them is reduced to a structural presence rather than a visible one. A large detachable marquise-cut morganite falls from the centre.

Damiani
Arte Maestra Impetuosa

Damiani’s new “Arte Maestra” collection reinterprets art history’s most significant works, with a savoir-faire spanning over a century. Katsushika Hokusai painted The Great Wave off Kanagawa in his early seventies, and Damiani has translated it into white gold and gemstones. The Impetuosa collier is set with 731 sapphires in chromatic gradation from deep blue at the base to pale at the crest, moving the eye upward exactly as Hokusai’s composition does. Sixty-three Paraíba tourmalines scatter like sea-foam. At the crest, a 3-carat trilliant-cut diamond stands where Hokusai placed Mount Fuji: small, still, and entirely in command.

Palmiero
Abissi Collier With Rubellite

Carlo Palmiero has spent four decades developing a visual language that owes nothing to anyone else: colour in up to 20 gradations of the same tone, pavé carrying upward of 4,500 stones per necklace, sculptural form that photography consistently undersells. The Abissi collier with rubellite is Palmiero at its most operatic — a wide double-row collar of rose gold and diamond pavé scattered with coloured stones, including blue topaz, peridot**,** and citrine, anchored by a large central rubellite in a baguette diamond frame. The rubellite — that specific crimson-raspberry no photograph captures honestly — does not compete with the collar. It completes it.

Roberto Coin
Cobra High Jewellery Necklace

The serpent is jewellery’s oldest motif, which is precisely why it is so difficult to do well. Roberto Coin introduced the Cobra at the Maison’s 30th anniversary in Venice; its arrival at Vicenzaoro as a full collection feels less like a launch than a homecoming. The high jewellery collar — yellow gold in the serpent-scale construction that 30 years of Coin craftsmanship has made possible — is set with rubies graduating through pink sapphires to diamonds as the scales travel forward. Each scale follows the body naturally. “Wonder is never something static,” says Roberto Coin. The Cobra confirms it.

Fope
Montedoria Navette

Gio Ponti’s Montedoria tower—that last, defiant flourish of his Milanese career, sheathed in green ceramic and drawn with the geometric confidence of a man who no longer had anything to prove — has found an unlikely afterlife in gold. FOPE’s tribute necklace borrows the building’s precision rather than its silhouette: four threads of Novecento mesh, that century-old weave achieved without solder, gather into black gold panels scored with white diamonds and emeralds, the latter a quiet nod to Ponti’s ceramic façade. At the centre, a navette-cut emerald anchors the composition, its elongated form cutting through the matte black like a single deliberate line of architecture.