Founded in Milan in 1967 by Pino Rabolini, Pomellato arrived at a moment when fashion, design and women’s lives were being rewritten, and treated jewellery with the same modern instinct that Italian prêt-à-porter was bringing to clothes: desirable, sensual, independent and made to be lived in.
That spirit sits at the centre of Pomellato, Le Joaillier Révolutionnaire, the maison’s first Paris exhibition, staged at the Palais de Tokyo and curated by Alba Cappellieri, Head of Jewellery Design at the Politecnico di Milano. Rather than presenting Pomellato as a chronology of products, The show cleverly frames the history of Pomellato as a series of revolutions: of image, craftsmanship, colour, style and women. It is a very smart decision, because Pomellato’s importance has always been as much cultural as it is decorative.
Iconic campaigns for Pomellato by (L-R) Helmut Newton (1982); Albert Watson (1985); and Michel Comte (1994) featuring Charlotte Rampling.
The most captivating section may be the “Revolution of Image”. Pomellato understood unusually early that jewellery could live through photography as much as it did through vitrines. Campaigns by Gian Paolo Barbieri, Helmut Newton, Albert Watson, Horst P. Horst, Snowdon, Javier Vallhonrat, Michel Comte and, newly folded into the story here, Herb Ritts, show how the maison used image-making to shape a woman who was not passive, ornamental or waiting to be admired. She was cinematic, self-possessed, often slightly dangerous. Newton’s 1982 campaign, with its woman in dark glasses beside a bulldog, still feels like a manifesto for jewellery as attitude.
The Palais de Tokyo is the ideal location for such an exhibition. Known for experimentation, large-scale installations and raw spaces, this is an audacious and pioneering museum that invites contemporary creation. Pomellato’s jewels are deeply experimental: their rounded volumes, saturated gems and tactile gold, belong to the language of bodies, clothes, skin and movement. The chains, from Gourmette and Boule to Catene and Iconica, are especially important. Pomellato took a form often treated as functional and gave it character, weight and sensuality.
L-R: Gourmette bracelets (1981); Asimmetrico bracelet (2000); and Nudo rings (2001), all pieces by Pomellato.
Colour is another act of rebellion. In a conservative jewellery world historically obsessed with hierarchy, Pomellato made room for pleasure: cabochons, unexpected stones, generous cuts, tonal clashes and the luminous simplicity of Nudo. Its “Free Gems” philosophy feels less like branding than a worldview, one in which value is emotional as well as material.
The exhibition’s final and most persuasive argument is Pomellato’s relationship with women. Through Pomellato for Women, founded in 2017, the maison connects its original 1960s spirit of female independence to contemporary conversations around equality and gender-based violence.
What emerges from this show is not just a portrait of a jeweller, but of a particularly Milanese kind of revolution: sophisticated, seductive, pragmatic and quietly radical.
Pomellato: Le Joaillier Révolutionnaire
24 June – 20 July, 2026
Palais de Tokyo
Free entry with reservation from 1 June, at pomellato.com
Author: Lina Ress
Lead image: Gian Paolo Barbieri for Pomellato (1971)
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