Two Worlds Collide: How Jewellery Enriched Fashion on the 2025/26 Catwalks

Sparkling with jewels, pearls and big crystal drops, the shattered chandelier top was the showpiece of Sarah Burton’s debut ready-to-wear collection at Givenchy earlier this year. Inspired by a chandelier in the Givenchy salon, deconstructed and reimagined as a garment worn by Jenna Ortega at the Emmys, it is the perfect illustration of how jewellery and fashion are inextricably linked. Rather than focusing on fashion houses making jewellery, this article explores how fashion designers are drawing inspiration from the precious materials of the jewellery world, removing them from their familiar settings and transforming them into couture.

Fashion historian Tony Glenville describes the relationship between jewellery and fashion as “eternal and all-embracing”, a dialogue that stretches from 18th-and 19^th- century gowns adorned with en tremblant flower displays to Nancy Cunard’s stacked bracelet “sleeves” in the 1930s, where jewellery replaced fabric.