Chase Some Rainbows With Hermes' High Jewellery Collection

Pierre Hardy’s jewellery for Hermes tends to be rather unexpected – see Lignes Sensibles, an earlier work that took inspiration from the human anatomy and featured designs reminiscent of stethoscopes.

For Les Formes De La Couleur – his latest high jewellery collection for the house – one could say he’s working with an equally esoteric starting point: colours, crystallising them into corporeal objects that people can wear. “I wasn’t trying to use colour to unite a range of heterogeneous objects, but quite the opposite, in fact,” he explains.

“The exploration of colour has produced extremely rich and extraordinarily diverse results. Rather than stifling this diversity, I wanted to pay tribute to it, and give it every opportunity to resonate and flourish. I’ve not sought to restrict, but rather, to allow.”

The results might just make Hermes’s most electric high jewellery outing to date. A good example is the oversized Color Vibes ring (pictured above), which has at its heart a 4.01‑carat emerald‑cut emerald, flanked by baguette‑cut diamonds on all four sides. What surrounds them, however, is anything but traditional: rows of coloured gems arranged in concentric waves, creating the effect of a psychedelic rainbow.

“I learnt about the theories of colour during my art degree, and I re‑immersed myself in them with passion and method to develop this collection,” says Hardy, Hermes’s creative director of jewellery, of the brand’s latest high jewellery collection. “This collection expresses colour in shapes. I wanted to find a way to express this fundamental phenomenon of colour at Hermes, and build a strong, autonomous and independent identity.”

True to its name Les Formes De La Couleur (French for “the shapes of colour”), the collection features pieces with bold and graphic silhouettes to complement the assertive use of coloured gems. The Arc En Couleurs collar necklace, for example, resembles a molten rainbow when draped around the neck, while the Color Flash bangle (pictured above) was inspired by – get this – pixelated digital images.

Art and play are core to Hermes. Take this single earring that has been aptly dubbed Fresh Paint, in which a variety of tsavorite garnets have been used to create a sense of depth, movement and texture, and overall, the illusion of painting with gemstones. “In addition to precious stones, we’ve also used semi‑precious stones to give us a broader, more precise palette,” says Hardy (tsavorite is often considered the semi‑precious – though rarer – cousin to emerald). “High‑quality jewelling and stone‑setting then produce subtle colour gradients.”

While colour has always been a mainstay at Hermes, Hardy remarks that this is the first time such a wide variety of coloured gems have been used for its high jewellery. The Color Icons bangle, for example, is crafted using an assortment of diamonds; yellow, blue and pink sapphires; tsavorite and spessartite garnets; amethysts; and grey and black spinels to produce the iridescent ombre effect on its clasp shaped like a horse’s head.

These three Fresh Paint rings in Hermes’s Les Formes De La Couleur high jewellery collection can be said to be eloquent treatises on their respective hues: (above, from left) violet, yellow and green. “Colour is a natural resource on which we can draw infinitely and I wanted to explore the whole spectrum,” says Hardy.

This article first appeared in the April 2025 Community Edition of FEMALE