THE CURATED EDITION.
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Edited by Melanie Grant for Phaidon, The Jewelry Book gathers 300 entries across two hundred years, from the great maisons to studio jewellers, and asks a better question than what a jewel is worth: what it changed.
JEWELLERY · BOOKS
A jewel becomes an icon not by its carat weight but by what it moves. That is the premise of The Jewelry Book, published by Phaidon in September 2025 and edited by Melanie Grant, a survey of two centuries in which the measure of a piece is its influence: on the craft, on taste, on the way people choose to present themselves.
The volume runs to 328 pages and 300 entries, each given its own page and a short essay by one of more than thirty specialist writers, with the selection shaped by an advisory committee. The result reads less like a catalogue than an argument, made one object at a time.
The familiar names are present: Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, Tiffany & Co. What gives the book its character is what stands beside them. Grant set out to cover every scale and every register of the discipline, from high jewellery to costume, from the historic to the contemporary, from heritage maisons to independent makers working alone. She has said that what makes the book different is precisely this eclectic mix.
Among the art jewellers are figures such as the New Zealand artist Joe Sheehan, who works in stone, and John Moore, whose pieces reach for materials far from the jeweller’s traditional bench. Their inclusion makes a quiet point: invention in jewellery has always come as often from the margins as from the Place Vendôme.
The book is as interested in wearers as in makers. Diana Vreeland appears in her warrior cuffs, photographed in 1982, a reminder that some people turned adornment into a personal language long before the word “personal brand” existed. Grant’s own view is that jewellery works less as armour than as amplification: it influences many people simply by being worn and seen.
The contemporary entries show how far technique is still being pushed. The Athens jeweller Nikos Koulis, known for black enamel in an Art Deco spirit, is represented by his ME series of 2023, which sets diamonds against aluminium. The Munich house Hemmerle, founded in 1893 and famous for having each piece made by a single craftsman, contributes a 2023 bracelet of iron and white gold holding a diamond of more than 16 carats. The pairing of an unglamorous metal with an extraordinary stone is exactly the kind of decision the book exists to honour.
Grant closes on the market, which she acknowledges can be difficult but considers cyclical. What endures, in her reading, is the symbolic depth of jewels, which comes from their longevity: objects made to outlast their owners and to carry meaning from one life into the next.
Gold and stones explain a jewel’s price. They rarely explain its power. Three hundred pages later, the lesson of the book is a simple one: the pieces that shaped generations did so because someone, somewhere, decided to do it differently.
Details: The Jewelry Book, edited by Melanie Grant, Phaidon, 2025, 328 pages. phaidon.com
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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