A Rainbow of Diamonds and Stones With More Than Meets the Eye Star in Louis Vuitton’s Latest High Jewelry Offering

MARRAKECH — Talk about main character energy.

With the high-beat pace of today’s world and with busy lives juggling careers, families and personal projects, modern women are more akin to Ancient Greece’s Hercules and his 12 labors than to the demure muses of classical art.

This action-hero script is what inspired “Mythica,” the latest high jewelry collection unveiled Wednesday by Louis Vuitton in a sunset show at the Kasbah D’If, a luxury property near Marrakech set on the edge of the Moroccan desert.

Models wearing designs by artistic director of women’s collections Nicolas Ghesquière took a turn in front of an audience that included clients from around the world and celebrities such as Léa Seydoux, Alicia Vikander, Phoebe Dynevor and Ana de Armas.

“Vuitton is the house of travel and tonight, we are here to celebrate travel in many different forms,” said Pietro Beccari, chairman and chief executive officer of Louis Vuitton. He described the collection as being “all about imagination.”

“It’s all about the travel and the journey of the mountain of our fantasies, the traditions, the legends, the mysteries, the magic, the gods and the goddesses, the heroines, are part of our tradition and part of our own inspiration.”

He called the gemstones in the collection “the third form of travel” the event celebrated, given the billion-year journey from their formation to the hands of the brand, which the executive hoped would continue “in the house of someone around the table,” which had guests from some 50 countries and nationalities.

The French luxury brand’s high jewelry studio unfurled this idea of navigating one’s own metaphorical trials across 11 chapters and a total of 110 pieces, which included for the first time a fountain pen.

If the tale looks inward, its expression at Louis Vuitton is anything but shy, leaning into the now-familiar mix of bold geometry and rare stones. Rather than a goal to be checked off a to-do list, each challenge was imagined as a door to explore symbols and values that represent each step of personal evolution, doubt and initiation replaced by mastery and triumph.

De Armas, who has fronted Vuitton’s high jewelry campaigns in recent years, told WWD she “liked this idea of a woman as the heroine of her own story — strong, multifaceted and guided by something deeply personal.”

“That’s what makes this collection feel strong to me,” she added. “It’s not just about beauty, it’s about owning your destiny.”

Set against the ochre palette of Marrakech and the fading desert light, the opening “Conquest” chapter took the arrow as shorthand for momentum, intent but also soft power, its aggressive point softened just enough to allude to the four-tipped flower of Vuitton monogram fame.

Taking pride of place is the necklace, its wide crenelated outline playing on white, yellow and rose gold set with 21 cushion step-cut rubies from Mozambique for just under 22 carats. Elsewhere in the set, yellow diamonds in the LV Monogram Star cut adorned arrows that climbed the ear as cuffs and earrings, or wrapped around the finger in a sweep of metal and stone.

For those needing luck on their side, the “Totem” chapter explored strength, protection and identity in 10 pieces, starting with a voluminous torque necklace set with 200 custom-cut diamonds, interspersed with sculpted yellow gold sections. It had something fluid, almost textile-like when passing through two gold sections that seemed to cinch the volumes.

Also in this set were pendants shaped like small amphorae, which opened to reveal minute spaces in which to store one’s most personal tokens, and the pen, for those who prefer to write their own stories by hand.

These chapters epitomized the dialogue that played out to great effect between mythology and modernity, symbolism and Vuitton’s own codes of chevrons, cords and monogram flowers.

The “New Precious” Gems

Where this Marrakech outing truly staked out fresh ground was in its gem choices.

If most high jewelers still orbit the traditional quartet — diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald — Louis Vuitton is actively building its own gemological vocabulary.

The French house’s global director of stones purchases department, an expert gemologist who cannot be named for safety reasons, said it’s an exercise in “mastering important carat weights and colors through what we call the ‘new precious’ [gemstones], which means stones that today have taken the [traditional] precious’ place in terms of rarity, color and large [size].”

Part of this shift is driven by the high jewelry boom, including from fashion brands, which has heightened sourcing competition — and opened the door to less canonical options as appetite for color grows.

Among the stones exemplifying this in “Mythica” was the cat’s-eye topaz of 127.66 carats, outstanding in its adularescence — the optical effect creating the telltale moving beam that seems to follow the viewer.

It took pride of place on the Enigma necklace with its ribbon-like construction that unfurled along the neckline with an additional four topazes and step-cut Santa Marina aquamarines that seemed to float below.

Such a material is niche, considering it was not even viewed as gemstone-grade for years, the gemologist said.

Another large grayish-blue topaz took pride of place on a transformable necklace of the same theme, which could be worn 10 ways and had required 1,532 hours of work to craft.

That’s not to say the four traditional precious stones weren’t given a good outing in “Mythica.”

Emeralds were the star of the Mesmerism suite, with a 17-carat Colombian emerald — a rarity of a specimen with almost no gardens inside — nestled in the twinning embrace of two voluminous strands of a lace-like take on the monogram, comprising more than 1,300 tiny floral motifs that were almost fabric-like in their articulation.

Meanwhile, the volutes-shaped Whisper and celestially minded Sirius chapters were “a world tour of corundrums,” the mineral family that contains sapphires and rubies, as the gemologist quipped, with rich blue sapphires hailing from Madagascar, Sri Lanka and Myanmar — plus lashings of minute emeralds or juicy tanzanite, including a pair of cabochon-cut drops in which flashes of blue, violet and lilac-pink could be glimpsed.

Playing Beyond the Visible Spectrum

Fierce demand has had many brands reaching deep into their vaults in search of under-loved stones, overlooked stocks and optical effects that may have been at time dismissed as flaws.

Take zircon, the natural stone that is the oldest one to form along with opals and diamonds, which is highly refractive but suffered from its proximity to the man-made cubic zirconia.

On the Fortitude single-row necklace, there was a 82.14-carat zircon from Cambodia, uncovered after spending decades in a safe. It was exceptional by its size but also by its hypnotic lagoon tones, which are no longer found in more recently extracted ones, such as those on the three-row necklace in the same theme.

Looking beyond what’s immediately visible was another throughline in the collection.

A viewer even needed UV lights to uncover all the secrets of the Spell chapter — provided they could look past oodles of moonstones and orange-pink imperial topazes with their fiery glow. Under a torch, hidden patterns appeared on the curving pavé surfaces, diamonds flashing a vivid blue.

For some, fluorescence can be seen as a drawback, but the brand’s stone maven and high jewelry studio flipped the script by treating it as a creative device to add a layer of surprise — and pushing the diamond supply chain to follow.

Suppliers had stopped tracking such properties but fluorescence can appear in as many variations as there are diamond colors. The latter property was an additional challenge, as the Vuitton high jewelry ateliers had to sift through tens of thousands of tiny gems to color match them in regular as well as UV lighting.

All the Colors of the Rainbow

The eyes of the house experts were further challenged for the 4,700 diamonds used for a gradient that went from honeyed orange to white on one of the collar necklaces in the Fortune theme, which evoked the reward after a trial.

The subtlety of the color variation reinforced the dynamic impression of the coil-like design, like gold wrapping around the neck — or the plumage of a phoenix, another idea from the chapter that appeared in hand-sculpted gold features that had something of the 1930s and golden age of jewelry.

But those weren’t the only colors of diamond that came into play in Vuitton’s high jewelry offering.

Culminating the collection was Victory, an epilogue built around a laurel wreath, a symbol of triumph since antiquity. The one offered by the French house espoused the neck, glittering with what the house’s gemological lead said could be used as “a master class to learn color diamond grading.”

Unlike other gemstones, where purity in color is sought after, the most sought-after diamonds need to have an equal balance of body color and overtone. In GIA-terms, it means having, say, a “green-blue” or “purple-pink” stone, rather than greenish-blue or purplish-pink.

No less than 38 hues came into play here, a rainbow that ran from oranges and lime greens to blues, reds and palest pinks. It had taken Vuitton’s gemological whizzes two-and-a-half years to source — a rather swift timeframe for such an exercise.

Next to it in the topmost room in the grand riad of Royal Mansour, where the pieces were on display ahead of the show, was the most expensive jewel in the collection: a ring with a 3.31-carat fancy vivid pink pear-cut diamond.

Hailing from South Africa, it was accompanied by a similarly shaped 1-carat yellowish green and a 2-carat LV Monogram Star-cut diamonds, valued in the eight-figure range.

By the time the model who closed the show wearing them vanished into the velvet night, Vuitton had made its case. In a field that’s growing larger in the number of major players, the edge over the competition isn’t just carat weight or even craftsmanship. It’s the willingness to go the extra mile.