What defines an icon today is no longer limited to recognizability or aesthetic permanence. Increasingly, it is about meaning, how symbols endure not because they are seen everywhere, but because they continue to resonate. With the launch of the Bvlgari ICONS Minaudière collection, the Roman High Jeweler reframes the evening accessory as something altogether more intimate, a carrier of culture.

Introduced by Mary Katrantzou, Creative Director of Leather Goods and Accessories, the collection marks Bvlgari’s first dedicated foray into evening minaudières. But these are not accessories in the conventional sense. Drawing on over 140 years of jewelry-making savoir-faire, each piece exists in a liminal space between adornment and object, crafted as a jewel, handled as a bag, and conceived as a symbolic artifact.

Courtesy of BVLGARI

The collection reimagines five of Bvlgari’s most enduring icons, Monete, Serpenti, Tubogas, Divas’ Dream, and BVLGARI BVLGARI, translating their visual languages into precious metal forms. Across the collection, high jewelry techniques, including lost-wax casting, hand-enameling, pavé settings, and gemstone inlays, are applied to accessories, reconfiguring the distinction between function and ornament.

That idea comes to life in the accompanying campaign, photographed by Ethan James Green and creatively directed by Ferdinando Verderi. Five women, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Linda Evangelista, Kim Ji-won, Isabella Rossellini, and Sumayya Vally, each embody one of the Maison’s icons. As part of the campaign, each icon is paired with a miniature book authored by the woman it represents and designed to fit inside the corresponding minaudière. Reflecting on creation, tradition, inner calm, nature, and belonging, these texts, published exclusively by Bvlgari, transform the ICON Minaudières into vessels of knowledge. To carry one is to carry a story, and to recognize that culture, like jewelry, gains its value from the meaning we assign to it.

Photography by Ethan James Green