Delfina Delettrez, the longtime Fendi jewelry designer and daughter of men’s designer Silvia Venturini Fendi, has also served as a sort of muse to Kim Jones, the women’s creative director who’s namechecked Delettrez in past shows as inspiration.

For his Autumn/Winter 2023 Haute Couture outing, Jones referenced her once again as Delettrez was also presenting her debut high jewelry collection for the Rome-based house. The jewels—white and yellow diamonds, green, orange, and pink sapphires, and spinel gems—were the starting point for the show and featured prominently on the runway.

Models clutched jewel box minaudières and wore jewel-like embellishments and layers of tonal paillettes and stones. The glittering rose glow of the final look took 1200 hours of handwork.

“We worked on a template based on Delfina’s high jewellery,” Jones said in the show notes. “If there is no jewellery, the idea is still present through the colour palette and embellishment in the collection; the clothes themselves take on the idea of jewellery. Colors come from flesh tones as well as that of stones: black diamonds, rubies, sapphires. There is a play of soft and hard, flesh and stone.”

The soft elements came through with fluid eveningwear, single-seam dresses, second-skin silks, intricate knits, and draped, chevron feathered shearlings.

“There is an emotional relationship that I have with the jewelry in the collection that I hope the women who will eventually wear it will have too,” Delettrez saidI. “There is an obsessive precision you need to make jewelry like this, such small objects that have such strength, meaning, and personality. And yet, in the end, they have a direct and intimate relationship to the body; they are a profound and personal extension of the woman.”