Luxury Jewellery Growth in 2026: Why It Is Outgrowing Fashion

The Met Value

Jewellery is fashion’s fastest-growing category, and the only one that never goes on sale. 

Walk through any department store in the first week of January, and the building will tell you exactly what it thinks of its own merchandise. Coats at forty per cent. Knitwear at half. A table of handbags with signage that reads as faintly apologetic. And then, somewhere near the centre of the ground floor, lit like a small chapel and staffed by someone who has been there for eleven years, a glass case that has never been discounted in its life and is not about to start.

The industry has a vocabulary for the rail by the escalator. Markdown, clearance, terminal stock, sell-through. It has no equivalent vocabulary for the jewellery counter, for the simple reason that nothing ever happens to the jewellery counter.

That counter is currently having the best year in the building.

The rule is that everything is supposed to die

Fashion is a depreciation business that has learned to describe itself in the language of permanence, and the trick is so well executed that customers rarely notice they are buying a decaying asset in a bag with a ribbon on it.

Consider what the machinery is actually for. Two principal seasons, plus pre-collections, plus resort, plus whatever a house invents to fill a gap in the shipping calendar. A forecasting industry paid to tell houses what colour to use two years from now, which is a subscription fee for the privilege of being told that the previous subscription has expired. A markdown calendar built into the margin before a single unit is sold, because everyone in the chain already knows that a portion of the stock will not sell at full price and has priced accordingly. A resale value that begins falling the moment the tag comes off, with narrow exceptions that the entire industry cites constantly and precisely because they are exceptions.

None of this is a flaw in the system. It is the engine. Fashion sells newness, and newness is only purchasable if the thing you bought last year has been quietly reclassified as old. The business requires its own products to expire on schedule. A house that made garments which held their value indefinitely would have solved a customer problem and destroyed a revenue model in the same gesture.

Which makes it worth asking why the fastest-growing thing in luxury is the one product category that refuses to participate.

The numbers are not subtle: Luxury Jewellery Growth  LVMH, Richemont and Kering

McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 reports that jewellery is now the fastest-growing fashion category by unit sales, expanding at more than four times the rate of clothing. The same report has 46 per cent of industry executives expecting conditions to worsen this year, up from 39 per cent, and records the midmarket displacing luxury as the industry’s primary creator of value.

The company accounts say it more bluntly than any survey could.

At LVMH, Fashion and Leather Goods, the division that contains the actual clothes and the actual handbags and most of the cultural power, turned over €18.1 billion in the first half of 2026 and shrank by one per cent organically. Watches and Jewellery turned over €5.2 billion and grew nine, accelerating to eleven in the second quarter, with Tiffany strengthening Knot and HardWear and Bulgari posting record revenue off a new high jewellery vision. The largest luxury group on earth had a flat half year in fashion and a very good one in jewels.

At Richemont, in the quarter to the end of June, the Jewellery Maisons grew 24 per cent at constant rates. That is Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Buccellati and Vhernier, and it was the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. The specialist watchmakers managed eight. The fashion houses, Chloé, Alaïa and Delvaux among them, managed nine. Richemont is a jewellery business that also owns some very beautiful clothes.

At Kering, the contrast is almost unkind. First-half revenue of €7.2 billion, up one per cent comparable. Gucci down five. Fashion and Leather Goods excluding Gucci down one, on €5.8 billion. And Kering Jewelry, meaning Boucheron and Pomellato and Qeelin, up 20 per cent comparable, on €521 million.

Three groups, the same signal, wildly different consequences. Hold that last pair of figures for a moment, because it is the whole argument in miniature: Kering’s fastest-growing business is roughly nine per cent the size of the business that is going backwards.

Why Luxury Jewellery Holds Its Value:  the glass case is exempt

The usual explanation is that jewellery is timeless, which is the sort of word used by people selling jewellery and should therefore be treated with suspicion.

The real exemption is structural, and it has four parts. Jewellery has no season, so it cannot be out of season. It has no markdown calendar, so no portion of its margin is pre-committed to its own failure. It does not buy trend forecasts, because a solitaire does not need to be told what is happening in 2028. And, uniquely in the building, it has a floor.

That floor is the interesting part. A dress has no salvage value. Unsold, unworn, out of season, it is worth whatever the liquidation market will pay for fabric with a label in it, which is approximately nothing and sometimes less than nothing once you account for warehousing. A gold chain has a melt value. It is the only object on the shop floor that cannot fall below the price of what it is made of.

And what it is made of has had a spectacular two years. Gold peaked at US 4,549. 74 announced in December 2025 and then reached an all-time high of US5, 589.38 on 28 January 2026, before dropping below five thousand in February and recovering above $5,200 within weeks. Volatile, certainly. But volatile around a number that would have been considered fantasy a decade ago, and volatility in the raw material of an asset is a very different proposition from obsolescence in the design of a garment. Gold goes down and then comes back. Last season does not come back.

So in a year when 46 per cent of executives expect things to get worse, the customer walks into a shop and buys the one item on the floor that behaves less like a purchase and more like a position.

The exception that proves the rule, expensively

Here is where it gets genuinely instructive, because there is one jewellery product that was built entirely on fashion’s logic, and the market destroyed it.

Lab-grown diamonds arrived with everything the fashion industry prizes. Infinite scalability. Falling unit costs. Aggressive price competition. A novelty story. No scarcity whatsoever, by design, since the entire proposition was that you could simply make more. Every one of those traits is a virtue in apparel manufacturing.

Edahn Golan’s wholesale price index for lab-grown diamonds is down 13 per cent year on year as of the second quarter of 2026, and down 96 per cent since tracking began in July 2018. Two-carat stones fell 20 per cent in a single year.

Ninety-six per cent. Not a correction. A demonstration.

The protection enjoyed by jewellery was never the material, and it was never the craft, both of which lab-grown diamonds have in abundance. The protection was the refusal to make more. Scarcity is the only mechanism in luxury that has ever actually held a price, and the moment a jewel was manufactured according to fashion’s rules, it received fashion’s outcome, compressed into seven years and administered without mercy.

Who is exempt, and how they got that way

Every house rule has someone standing outside it, and the exemption here is unusually revealing because nobody earned it through taste.

Richemont is insulated because it is essentially a jewellery company with a fashion department. LVMH is insulated because it bought Bulgari in 2011 and Tiffany in 2021, which means a flat half in fashion is survivable. Kering is exposed because its jewellery houses, excellent as they are, amount to a rounding error against Gucci.

So the thing determining which conglomerate is comfortable this year is not a creative director, not a show, not a campaign, and not a single decision made in the last eighteen months. It is an acquisition signed years ago by someone in a finance department who was almost certainly not thinking about how the clothes would be selling in the autumn of 2026.

The houses that look clever right now are the ones that happened to buy a jeweller. That is the exception. It was not developed. It was purchased.

What the customer has actually worked out

Fashion spent a century teaching its customers a single lesson with enormous conviction, which is that things do not last and the correct response is to buy again.

The customers learned it. They learned it extremely well. And then, in a nervous year, they applied the lesson to fashion itself, looked along the ground floor at everything that had been engineered to expire, and moved their money into the one case that was exempt.

There is something close to poetry in an industry built on manufactured impermanence being carried through a difficult year by the only product it sells that does not behave like fashion at all. The growth category in luxury is functionally a savings account with a clasp.

Which is a verdict, delivered quietly, on everything else on the floor.