Carat65 pieces of freestyle: Pomellato's Paraíba-and-sapphire argument
Stile Libero, the Milanese house's new high jewelry collection, runs 65 pieces across three chapters — a 99-sapphire mandala carrying about 45 carats, a choker of 21 pear Paraíba tourmalines at 20.15 carats, earrings set with 540 diamonds.
Pomellato's answer to the couture-week arms race arrived under a manifesto title: Stile Libero — freestyle. The Milanese house's new high jewelry collection, detailed by National Jeweler this week after its June unveiling in Milan, runs 65 pieces organized into three chapters, and reads as a sustained argument that color and volume, not carat-counting, are where Italian high jewelry wins. Creative director Vincenzo Castaldo calls the collection "the art of moving instinctively, embracing courage to blend skills."
The first chapter, Visionary Colors, carries the technical signature: the house's serti libre setting, which scatters stones in deliberately irregular rhythm. Its anchor is the Mandala Chromia necklace, set with 99 fancy-cut sapphires totaling roughly 45 carats in a multicolor gradient, and its market statement is the Drops of Paraíba choker — 21 pear-cut Paraíba tourmalines at 20.15 carats, in a year when fine Paraíba per-carat prices rival important diamonds. Tanzanites round out the palette, three stones deep in the electric-blue lane the big French houses have lately made their own.
The second and third chapters diversify the bet. Magnetic Gold leans on the house's foundational material with voluminous chains, an Attache necklace set with four emerald-cut brown diamonds at 6.74 carats, and the Note di Luce rings, each built around a single unusually colored diamond. Hypnotic Shadows goes to the bench: openwork pieces developed with the French gold-lace artisan Sara Bran, and the Ipnotica earrings carrying 540 diamonds in rose gold — labor as the luxury, in the same key as Boucheron's 3,200-hour morganite necklace across the Alps.
Strategically, the collection is Kering's jewelry flagship planting itself firmly in the current of the season: brown and multicolor stones over white, semi-precious volume over metal weight, technique as the story. It is also aimed at a client the auction data says exists — the buyer trading up from Pomellato's iconic gold chains into six-figure one-offs, in a market where the houses' high jewelry divisions have outgrown nearly everything else they sell.
The desk's view: the Paraíba choker is the piece to remember. A generation ago a 20-carat Paraíba suite was a specialist's trophy; today it anchors a Milanese house's collection while blue diamonds do the same job in Paris — the colored-stone pyramid keeps adding floors above the diamond one. Independents can't buy 99 matched sapphires, but they can steal the grammar: irregular settings, warm metals, one saturated stone doing the talking. Freestyle scales down.