Richemont’s jewellery run has been the story of the year in luxury coverage for seven straight quarters now. That part isn’t new. What’s new is that LVMH’s H1 2026 results, out Monday, and Kering’s Q1 numbers before them, now say the same thing independently. Three groups that don’t coordinate their messaging are all pointing at the same part of the business. That’s what a category shift actually looks like.
LVMH’s group revenue came in at €38.6 billion for the first half, down from €39.8 billion a year earlier, a 3% reported decline, though organic growth (which strips out currency) was positive 2%. One division was the clear growth driver. Watches & Jewelry generated €5.2 billion, up 9% organically for the half, and the growth accelerated through the year, from 7% in Q1 to roughly 11% in Q2. Fashion & Leather Goods, the division that still generates over 70% of the group’s operating profit, only just returned to organic growth in Q2 after roughly seven quarters of weak, often negative growth.
Sit with that for a second. LVMH’s smallest business delivered its strongest growth, while the one that actually pays the bills was still shrinking in the first quarter, and barely grew in the second.
It isn’t just LVMH, and it isn’t just one brand within LVMH
Richemont reported jewellery Maisons up 24% at constant rates for the three months to 30 June, its seventh straight quarter of double-digit growth. That figure understates the story rather than overstating it: Europe alone grew 11%, and it grew on top of a double-digit comparative from the year before. That’s compounding on top of an already strong year, the harder version of growth to pull off.
Kering, further along in its own turnaround, told a smaller version of the same story back in Q1. Its jewellery division, Boucheron and Pomellato among them, grew 22% on a comparable basis while the group’s core Fashion & Leather Goods fell 3% and total group revenue sat flat. Kering’s H1 figures aren’t out yet, so this is a Q1-to-H1 comparison across the three groups rather than a perfectly matched set, worth flagging plainly. But the direction is identical in all three cases: jewellery outrunning the rest of the portfolio, by a wide margin, at the same time.
One group’s numbers could be execution. Two could be coincidence. Three groups that don’t talk to each other, all showing the same divergence at once, is the market talking.
Inside LVMH, Tiffany and Bvlgari Are Both Doing the Work
Tiffany and Co. HardWear black titanium, platinum, and diamond necklace – CREDIT: Tiffany and Co.
The obvious read is Tiffany. Its turnaround has been loud and well covered. But LVMH’s CFO, Cécile Cabanis, was clear on the H1 call that it isn’t a single-brand story. Sixty percent of Tiffany’s business is now what she called the “transformed” side, built around icon lines, and it’s growing far faster than what remains of the legacy silver business, which is still shrinking. HardWear alone is up around 75% year on year.
Knot is close behind, near 50%. That’s not a brand steadying itself. That’s a brand where the new business has to outrun a shrinking old one just to post the group-wide number LVMH reported.
Bvlgari isn’t riding on Tiffany’s momentum either. Cabanis described Bvlgari and Tiffany as both growing in the mid-teens in Q2, and Bvlgari’s growth was spread evenly across regions rather than concentrated in one market. Its March launch, Eclettica, a high jewellery collection built around 128 new designs, has since gone on to post record revenue for the line. Chaumet, smaller again, grew off the continued expansion of Bee de Chaumet.
None of this is best read as constant reinvention for its own sake. Eclettica extends Bvlgari’s own codes into new pieces rather than departing from them. Bird on a Pearl, one of Tiffany’s high jewellery launches this year, does the same with Jean Schlumberger’s archive for the house. The growth is coming from newness, but newness built on decades-old house language, which is a different thing entirely from newness for its own sake.
Leadership at Bulgari changed hands, and the real story is what stayed the same
Laura Burdese became Bvlgari’s CEO on 1 July, moving up from deputy CEO, a role she’d held since July 2024. This was telegraphed two years in advance, and it’s worth resisting the temptation to read drama into the timing.
The more interesting structural detail is what Jean-Christophe Babin kept. He remains chairman of Bvlgari’s board, CEO of Bulgari Hotels, president of the Bvlgari Foundation, and head of LVMH’s group-wide Watches division. LVMH has, in effect, split the jewellery operating job at Bvlgari from the watch group job that sits above it. For a group whose watches business is still slightly negative even as jewellery accelerates, that’s a structural signal worth more attention than the succession headline itself.
On pricing, Cabanis got ahead of the obvious question
The standard follow-up to any luxury beat this year is whether it’s really volume, or price dressed up as demand. Cabanis addressed it directly on the call, cautioning analysts to “be careful when you look at it on the face value,” since the price increases were confined to specific ranges and specific products rather than applied broadly, with real volume growth underneath.
Worth treating that answer with some care rather than taking it as settled. Richemont, in its own July release, explicitly flagged elevated raw material costs, and jewellery is the most metal-exposed category in luxury: gold and platinum price moves alone can flatter reported revenue growth without any change in unit volumes. Neither LVMH nor Richemont discloses a volume-price split by individual Maison, so Cabanis’s answer, however candid, isn’t independently verifiable from the outside. It’s the CFO’s own account of the one number that could undercut her own narrative, and it deserves to be printed as exactly that.
There’s also a comps point worth making plainly, because it cuts in jewellery’s favour rather than against it. Fashion & Leather Goods’ return to growth this half is a return from a genuinely weak base, roughly seven straight quarters of weak, often negative growth behind it. Jewellery’s growth, at both LVMH and Richemont, is compounding on top of prior periods that were already strong. Growing off a strong base is a harder thing to do than growing off a weak one, and it’s the more impressive number of the two.
What this means for the trade
Set LVMH, Richemont and Kering’s numbers side by side and the picture holds across all three: jewellery divisions built on longstanding icon lines are outperforming the fashion and leather goods businesses that have carried these groups’ identities for decades. The growth engine right now isn’t speed to market. It’s depth in a small number of ideas, held and refreshed over decades, arriving at the moment fashion’s core categories are struggling to find their footing.
For brands without that inventory of owned silhouettes to draw on, that’s the harder read in all this. It’s a much slower asset to build than a good season, and all three groups were quietly building it long before it started showing up in the numbers this clearly.
Sources: LVMH’s H1 2026 results and earnings call, 27 July. Richemont’s Q1 FY27 trading update, 15 July. Kering’s Q1 2026 results, 14 April, the most recent Kering has published, so that comparison sits a quarter behind the other two.
Further reading:
The Franchise Effect: Why One Jewellery Idea Wins
The three events that decide what the jewellery trends are in 2026
Published: July 28, 2026 Updated: July 28, 2026