On the evening of 12 May, on the steps of the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, Demi Moore arrived wearing 263.34 carats of diamonds. That is the official tally: a 226-carat bib necklace in five rows of natural diamonds set in 18-carat white gold, cluster earrings of 22.87 carats, and two additional rings. All Chopard. Styled by Brad Goreski alongside a custom beaded strapless Jacquemus gown. Moore is on the jury at this year's festival. She dressed accordingly.
I don't say that to be reductive. 263 carats requires prior intention. You don't assemble that on accident. And the Palais steps are, frame for frame, the most reliably photographed jewellery context in the world — more consistent than any auction, any state visit. What goes up those steps gets studied. Whether that's a good reason to wear something or a bad one depends on your view of the relationship between jewellery and the people photographing it.
The Cannes Film Festival has been running since 1946. For the first fifty-two of those years, the jewellery on the red carpet was simply whatever the attending women owned or chose to borrow. Since 1998, it has been a different kind of arrangement.
In Brief: Chopard has partnered with the Cannes Film Festival since 1998, dressing the jury and casting the Palme d'Or in 118 grams of 18-carat Fairmined gold each year; in 2026, Demi Moore wore 263.34 carats of their diamonds on the opening night. Readers gain a clear account of how the official partnership works alongside the competing houses, Pomellato, Bulgari, Damiani, and Chaumet, that also claimed the red carpet.
What Chopard actually makes for Cannes
Chopard has been the official jewellery and watch partner of the Cannes Film Festival since 1998. The Swiss house, founded in 1860 in Sonvilier and now co-run by Caroline and Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, provides red carpet jewellery, dresses the jury, and, most visibly, makes the trophy.
The Palme d'Or has been manufactured by Chopard since that first year of the partnership. The 2026 trophy is cast in 118 grams of 18-carat Fairmined gold: gold certified as responsibly sourced from artisanal mines, a distinction Chopard has made a point of since their 2018 Journey to Sustainable Luxury initiative. Inside each trophy, there is a real palm frond: a frond is sourced, cast in wax, then lost as the gold takes its place in the process. The result is unique. It also, technically, destroys a living thing in order to exist. This has never seemed to trouble anyone involved.
Alongside the trophy, Caroline Scheufele designs an annual Red Carpet collection specifically for the festival. This year's collection is called Miracles. The theme is transformation, light, and fantasy. The stones are predominantly sky-toned: aquamarines, pale sapphires, white diamonds in white gold, and the collection includes what Scheufele describes as bestiary pieces: animals rendered in high jewellery, a recurring thread in Chopard's haute joaillerie that dates back several decades. The collection debuts at Cannes, worn across the twelve days of the festival. Some pieces will return to Geneva. Others, presumably, will not.
Opening night: what was worn, and by whom
Chopard dressed the jury. Demi Moore's 226-carat bib necklace has already been covered at length in the trade press; what's less discussed is that Ruth Negga, who sits beside Moore on the 2026 jury, also wore Chopard: a diamond solitaire necklace, worn against a Saint Laurent green lace dress, at a considerable remove from Moore's volume. The same house, deployed at entirely different registers. Both choices were deliberate, and Negga's specifically required a degree of confidence to land correctly. It landed correctly.
The rest of the opening night told a different story.
Jane Fonda arrived in Pomellato. Specifically, the Iconica necklace from the Italian house's 2026 High Jewellery collection: a 46-carat oval cabochon milky aquamarine set in white gold, hung on a diamond-set chain, worn with a pair of diamond Nudo rings and a custom black sequinned Gucci gown. Fonda is eighty-eight. She is also one of the most photographed women on earth and has been for sixty years. Her wearing Pomellato, and not Chopard, the official partner she was standing thirty metres from, was not an oversight.
Pomellato, the Milanese house now owned by Kering, has been building its Cannes presence methodically. Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, the actress known to most people as Sylvie in Emily in Paris and to Pomellato as their global ambassador, was also on the red carpet in a different piece from the same High Jewellery collection. Two women, one house, one evening. The calculation was the same as Chopard's, at a different budget.
Kelly Rutherford chose the Damiani Gioia del Mare necklace (Joy of the Sea), a piece set with eighty-seven Paraíba tourmalines totalling around twenty-four carats and three hundred and seventy-six brilliant-cut diamonds. Paraíba tourmaline is, at present, among the most expensive coloured gemstones by carat weight; the electric blue-green comes from trace amounts of copper in the crystal structure and occurs in commercially viable quantities in only a handful of locations. The use of it here, in Mediterranean light, against a Giorgio Armani gown, was a considered choice by someone who understood what the stone looks like in natural light.
Rebecca Donaldson wore Bulgari: a waterfall diamond piece from their High Jewellery collection that ran from her ears to her collarbones. Gillian Anderson was in Chaumet, the Paris house historically associated with French imperial courts and presently in the LVMH stable. Dame Joan Collins, ninety-two, wore a substantial suite of what appears to be white diamonds in a setting that was not publicly attributed to a house, which is either because the press materials weren't circulated in time, or because she was wearing her own.
The economics
One reading of an opening night like this is that it is a lot of expensive jewellery worn by wealthy women at a party. That is also accurate.
But the Cannes red carpet is the most efficient publicity apparatus the jewellery industry has, and the people involved know it. Chopard's partnership is estimated (the number is not public) to cost several million euros annually. Against that, Demi Moore in 263 carats of their diamonds on the most photographed steps in Europe represents a return that is, by any media measurement, significant. The coordination begins months in advance: the pieces are proposed, negotiations happen, the stylist and the brand align on what goes with what. The women wearing the pieces are not passive, as Brad Goreski's specific involvement with Moore's look, for instance, is well documented, but the commercial infrastructure underneath is what it is.
What's interesting about 2026 specifically is how visible the competition has become. Chopard holds the official relationship. They make the trophy. Caroline Scheufele attends the official dinners. But Fonda in Pomellato, Rutherford in Damiani's Paraíba piece, Anderson in Chaumet: that is four houses making an active claim on the same audience on the same night. The Cannes red carpet has always been a competition; it is becoming a more explicit one. It is a competition that runs on the same logic as the broader diamond market in 2026: the houses fighting hardest for visibility are the ones whose commercial-grade business is under most pressure.
The Miracles collection
Scheufele's brief was transformation, light, and fantasy. The palette is pale, cool, and luminous: the aquamarine pieces that have been photographed in the first days of the festival read almost white in direct sun, deepening to blue in shade. This is calibrated for outdoor photography in the south of France in May, which is a very specific brief that requires some prior knowledge of how stones behave in that light.
The bestiary pieces (what's been photographed so far includes birds, which are unusual in Chopard's recent high jewellery output) use coloured enamel work alongside set stones, which is technically demanding and photographically distinctive. Enamel at this level holds colour in ways that stones alone cannot.
The most technically interesting pieces in the collection appear to be the pavé diamond pieces: rings and earrings using white diamonds at densities that render the gold setting almost invisible, leaving what photographs as a continuous surface of light on the skin. This is not a new technique in jewellery, but Scheufele's application of it for this year's Red Carpet collection feels calibrated specifically for the context: strong Mediterranean sun, moving subjects, rapid photography. The pieces were made to be caught in passing.
Whether any of them will be available to buy is not yet clear. Chopard's high jewellery at this level rarely carries a published price. What it carries instead is this: the association with a week of press coverage that no advertising budget can replicate.
What Cannes actually does for jewellery
There is a version of this story in which the Cannes red carpet is just a very expensive costume party, and the jewellery is props. That version is not entirely wrong. But it misses something about what actually happens when a stone of Paraíba tourmaline or a 46-carat aquamarine gets photographed in that light, on a recognisable woman, in front of a crowd who have come specifically to look.
The Cannes Film Festival runs twelve days. By the end of those twelve days, most of the pieces in Chopard's Miracles collection will have been photographed hundreds of thousands of times, referenced in several hundred publications, and associated — permanently, in the archive — with the specific women who wore them. This is not how jewellery has historically been sold or valued. Jewellery was sold from cases, in private, by appointment. The Cannes model inverts that entirely: it makes private objects public, associates them with public figures, and uses the resulting image as the primary sales mechanism.
Whether that is good for jewellery as a category, whether it produces objects that people love and keep, or objects that are consumed and forgotten, is a question I think about more than I probably should. The Hope Diamond got a similar treatment when Harry Winston took it on his travelling Court of Jewels exhibition in the 1950s, and that appears to have worked out for it. The same applies to the pieces Elizabeth Taylor wore on the red carpets of her own era: the photograph and the stone became one object in the archive, and the stone was the more durable of the two.
The Palme d'Or, at least, was made to last. It will sit in a display case somewhere, in a director's house, in a cinematheque, on a shelf in a study in Seoul or Paris or New York, for longer than any of the red carpet images. That's the one piece Chopard makes for Cannes that nobody is trying to photograph the following morning.
Frequently asked questions
How long has Chopard been the official jeweller of Cannes?
Chopard has been the official jewellery and watch partner of the Cannes Film Festival since 1998. As part of this partnership, Chopard designs an annual Red Carpet high jewellery collection for the festival and has manufactured the Palme d'Or trophy every year since.
Who makes the Palme d'Or trophy, and what is it made of?
The Palme d'Or has been made by Chopard since 1998. The trophy is cast in 18-carat Fairmined gold and weighs approximately 118 grams. A real palm frond is incorporated into the casting process, producing a unique object for each year's winner.
What jewellery did Demi Moore wear at Cannes 2026?
At the opening ceremony of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on 12 May 2026, Demi Moore wore Chopard High Jewellery: a 226.34-carat five-row diamond bib necklace set in 18-carat white gold, 22.87-carat diamond cluster earrings, and two diamond rings totalling an additional 14.13 carats — 263.34 carats in total. The jewellery was worn with a custom beaded strapless Jacquemus gown, styled by Brad Goreski.
What is the Chopard Miracles high jewellery collection for Cannes 2026?
Miracles is Chopard's 2026 Red Carpet collection for the Cannes Film Festival, designed by Caroline Scheufele. The collection is themed around transformation, light, and fantasy, with a palette of sky-toned stones: aquamarines, pale sapphires, and white diamonds, alongside bestiary-inspired pieces in enamel and set stones.
What other jewellery houses dressed celebrities at Cannes 2026?
The opening night of the 79th Cannes Film Festival featured jewellery from several houses alongside official partner Chopard: Pomellato, worn by Jane Fonda and Pomellato ambassador Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu; Bulgari, worn by Rebecca Donaldson; Damiani, whose Gioia del Mare Paraíba tourmaline necklace was worn by Kelly Rutherford; and Chaumet, worn by Gillian Anderson.
When does the Cannes Film Festival take place in 2026?
The 79th Cannes Film Festival takes place from 12 to 23 May 2026 at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, France.
Sources: Natural Diamond Council red carpet coverage; Harper's Bazaar Arabia, Cannes 2026 jewellery round-up; Something About Rocks, Cannes 2026 coverage; Villa88, Cannes 2026 preview; Chopard official press materials. Photography: Getty Images/PA Images.
