At the inaugural Grand Prix de la Haute Joaillerie awards in Monaco in October, the Best New Talent prize went to a newcomer whose name is well established in another corner of the industry. Sahag Arslanian, a third-generation member of a respected Antwerp diamond family, impressed the jury with the Lunar Eclipse Grand Collier, a high jewellery necklace centred on a 15.59-carat fancy yellow diamond, surrounded by more than 1,100 stones and set in 250 grammes of gold. Its subtle dual-tone construction required the entire piece to be disassembled and reassembled by hand, creating a play of shade and light that mirrors the natural shift between sunlight and moonshadow.
Arslanian spent years sourcing and trading some of the world's rarest coloured diamonds -- the pinks, blues, yellows, greens, oranges, champagnes and cognacs prized by connoisseurs for their nuance over their intensity. He felt the market lacked a design language that matched the stones' character.
"At some point, I realised these extraordinary gems needed a proper vessel," he says. "There's so much poetry in the softer tones, in the in-between shades that nature creates only once. I wanted to give them the same stage as the so-called vivid ones." Arslanian launched his eponymous brand during Paris Fashion Week in July, with a series inspired by the celestial world.
He describes the move from diamond dealing to high jewellery design as "almost inevitable". His work emphasises innovation and wearability. "Engineering, design and emotion should all work together to create something that feels alive, not just impressive," he says. Arslanian's next step is the opening of his first boutique on Avenue Matignon in Paris this December.
Like Arslanian, Satta Matturi's relationship with diamonds began early. Raised in a family connected to the trade, the Sierra Leone-born designer grew up with an instinctive understanding of the stone's cultural and economic weight. After 17 years at De Beers, working in the wholesale division in South Africa and Botswana, she launched her fine jewellery brand in London in 2015. This summer, Matturi opened her first showroom, in Mayfair. The private salon offers an insight into the jeweller's world: bespoke wooden vitrines, rotating contemporary African art on the walls and a selection of pieces from her ongoing series.
Matturi's creations often reference sculptural forms, masks and totems; others centre on the calabash gourd, a recurring motif across west African culture. The Nomoli Mansa brooch, for instance, uses 13 carats of natural diamonds to reinterpret carved ancestral figures from Sierra Leone and Guinea. "People have described my work as Afro deco. I love that," the jeweller says. "It's about bringing African influences into art deco and vice versa."
Matturi begins with the concept, then selects the gemstones to express it. "The diamond comes into that narrative -- not just for provenance, but for what it represents," she says. Her procurement and production choices reflect nearly two decades of industry proximity: she works with Single Mine Origin gold from Ivory Coast, diamonds from Diamond Trading Company siteholder channels and coloured gemstones from women-owned mines in Tanzania, Zambia, Madagascar and Kenya. The showroom, she says, is less a commercial expansion than a structural reorientation -- "a reset". "It's wonderful to have a space just to sit and engage. People miss that. It's about the stories -- we miss that a lot in society."
New York-based jeweller Jade Trau offers another interpretation of the diamantaire-to-designer trajectory. Trained under her grandfather on 47th Street, she spent 13 years in the diamond trade during a period of rapid industry consolidation, with production shifting to larger overseas facilities.
"I felt like I was adding value in the pipeline," she says of her early years, "but later it became more about import and export than making." She launched her brand in 2012, developing a vocabulary that balances Victorian silhouettes with modern-cut diamonds.
Trau's designs are acclaimed for their clean settings, softened geometry and a focus on movement against the skin. Her latest collection is a group of charms symbolising luck and protection, initiated after the death of her father last year. Her pieces are stocked at Harrods in London, with further distribution under consideration.
In Antwerp, David Gotlib has narrowed the field still further, dedicating his brand entirely to men's cufflinks. A third-generation diamantaire, he began polishing and sawing stones in 1999 before moving into both polished and rough trading. However, that did not allow him to express fully his artistic impulse. "Trading diamonds taught me discipline, an eye for quality and respect for the material," he says, "but over time I realised that trading alone didn't satisfy my creative side." The brand, launched in 2016, opened its own Antwerp atelier in 2022 to consolidate production and preserve craft consistency.
Gotlib's cufflinks draw on art deco geometry, and feel architectural and tailored rather than ornamental. Instead of launching seasonal collections, he develops ongoing design families -- Aurum, Vespera and Chroma -- refining proportions and gemstone pairings over time.