A Revolution in Jewels: Pomellato at Palais de Tokyo

Shot by fashion photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri in 1971, Pomellato’s first campaign was more than an advertisement. It was a manifesto—a promise to challenge convention, to embrace difference and individuality, and to celebrate women. It featured the now-iconic Le Gemelle (The Twins), a photograph as uncanny as it is alluring. It shows two identical women—both the actress Lilly Bistrattin—seemingly conjoined by a fitted top with two rounded neck holes and a voluminous hat. The illusion of their connectedness is disrupted, however, by a mysterious hand bedecked in undulating bangles limply draped over the left twin’s right shoulder. The pair’s black clothing set against the solid gray backdrop creates silhouettes that echo the curves of the structured chokers that slither around their respective necks.

Much like Diane Arbus’s earlier Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1966 (1966), Barbieri’s photograph embraces eccentricity and, through styling and pose, subverts the notion that even two identical women are truly the same. For the first time in the world of jewelry, necklaces and bracelets were being presented not just as a vaunted objects, but as assertions of individuality, extensions of inner beauty. The campaign was, in a word, a revolution, and for Pomellato, it was just the beginning.

It is no wonder, then, that professor Alba Cappellieri, curator and head of jewelry design at Politecnico di Milano, chose revolution as the unifying theme for the exhibition Pomellato, Le Joaillier Révolutionnaire, on view at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, June 24 through July 20, 2026. The expansive presentation includes historic jewelry and fine-art photographs, charting the evolution of the house’s visual language through its many collaborations with titans of the photographic medium. As Cappellieri explains, the show is an opportunity to become immersed in the revolutions in creativity, craft, image, style, meaning, and femininity that characterize the house. It is not simply a chronological history; it is the story of “how photography redefined what jewelry could mean” and “how jewelry can be a lens through which to read broader cultural and social transformations.”

Founded in Milan in 1967 by Pino Rabolini, the son of an Italian goldsmith, Pomellato takes its name from the speckle-coated horse, a symbol of rarity, but also the unbridled freedom of the late 1960s. Indeed, Rabolini’s initial idea for the brand was sparked by the vitality of women creatives—actresses, ceramicists, singers—that he encountered at the Jamaica Bar, a local haunt for intellectuals, artists, and performers that still exists today. He started Pomellato to pay homage to these women and the liberal spirit of the age through his family’s craft.

Establishing such a brand in the mid-twentieth century presented the major challenge of rewriting jewelry’s cultural codes. “Rabolini understood very clearly that jewelry could no longer be regarded only as an object of status or investment,” Cappellieri told me. “It had to become part of a lifestyle, a gesture, a personality.” It needed to be infused with the same sense of joy, freedom, and individuality that defined Italian prêt-à-porter. Jewelry, then its own independent category, had to become a part of the larger world of fashion, as it is today. “So, despite his limited financial resources, Rabolini made the visionary decision to entrust Pomellato’s image to Gian Paolo Barbieri.” The result, Le Gemelle, laid the foundation for Pomellato’s distinct, but ever-evolving, visual identity and established a new conversation between jewelry and photography, and jewelry and fashion.

Over the ensuing decades, Pomellato has maintained a public image in step with the shifting lives of women through collaborations with legendary fashion photographers. This began in the 1980s with Helmut Newton, whose campaigns surged with sensuality and cinematic glamour. Newton’s women are made up in smoky eyes and dark lips, or wear sunglasses inside. They dine alone, confidently, with their dopey bulldog in tow, or pull a man in by the chin for a kiss. They exude a boldness that borders on audacity, just as their jewelry serves as a glistening declaration of agency, independence, and strength.

Later in the decade, Pomellato would turn to Horst P. Horst, a master of “classic” fashion photography known for his sculptural images and nuanced use of chiaroscuro. His 1987 campaign featured a model reclined in a C-curve showcasing her delicate musculature and a group of cascading gold chains—a house signature—draped down her back. The image oozes elegance and stylish sophistication. It also exhibits a different sort of feminine strength than Newton’s—subtler in its assertion, but just as resolved.

Notable campaigns from the 1990s expressed a pronounced sense of intimacy. Herb Ritts’s portraits of nude, clay-covered bodies holding Pomellato chains are marked by their simplicity and frankness. Even more poignant is a photograph from Snowdon’s campaign of 1992. The magnetic picture captures a woman with her hair swept over the right side of her face, exposing her left eye and ear hung with a rounded cabochon. This is not an encounter or a declaration, but an invitation to observe a woman arrested in a moment of introspection. Her visage, both revealed and concealed, alludes to the complexities of identity, just as the cabochon—a unique stone—acts as a metaphor for the beauty of individuality.

History is made when someone summons the courage to break with convention. The exceptional quality and historic importance of the photographs included in Pomellato, Le Joaillier Révolutionnaire are testaments to the maison’s pioneering vision and spirit. Through its many revolutions, the house has left an indelible mark on the history of photography and on the lives of women by transforming the ways jewelry communicates meaning. Even today, Pomellato continues to break down barriers with projects such as Pomellato for Women, an initiative launched in 2017 to promote gender equality in myriad contexts.

In preparation for the Paris exhibition, Cappellieri asked her mother, a jewelry enthusiast, to share how Pomellato’s advertisements affected her in her youth. “Oh,” her mother said, “it was really a new way of looking at jewelry.” The subtext: It was really a new way of looking at the world.