Graff pins the butterfly: twelve brooches built to tremble

§1A 1975 motif, re-pinned.

Graff has taken the butterfly, its house motif since 1975, and pinned it to one of jewelry's oldest formats. The London house's new high-jewelry capsule comprises twelve brooches designed as jabot pins, the double-ended fasteners of the seventeenth century, each one convertible into a pendant. The wings are mounted en tremblant, on tiny sprung mechanisms, so the butterflies flutter with the wearer's movement rather than sitting still under glass.

§2The full register of stones.

The stone work runs the house's full register. Tamara sets a marquise-cut emerald at the center of an Art Deco sunburst in white gold and diamonds. Freya borrows an archival dragonfly design and paves its wings in fancy-cut and pear-shaped yellow diamonds. Eva, the painterly one, arcs a gradient of sapphires, emeralds, Paraíba tourmalines and diamonds across its span, an effect the house traces to Monet's garden canvases, with miniature butterflies scattered around the principal one for extra motion. Lina works square-cut pink sapphires into an invisible setting, finishing the jabot tip with a marquise pink sapphire and a pavé butterfly.

Design director Anne-Eva Geffroy framed the collection simply: "there is something deeply poetic about the form of a butterfly". The poetry has structure under it. The jabot format solves the brooch's oldest commercial problem, which is that modern wardrobes give it nowhere to sit; a pin that becomes a pendant is two objects for one price, and the tip ornament, a single butterfly, emblem or jewel at the pin's opposite end, lets the piece read differently on a lapel, a knit or a gown.

§3The brooch revival has numbers.

The capsule lands in a brooch market that is quietly reviving. Auction bidders have spent two seasons paying attention to convertible and mechanical jewels, the couture houses put monumental brooches on half the fall runways, and en tremblant work, a nineteenth-century specialty, has become shorthand for the kind of handwork machine settings cannot fake. All twelve pieces are priced on request, which at Graff's level of stone sourcing is less coyness than honesty: no two Paraíba gradients cost the same.