A colourful suite of precious Chopard jewellery designed by Rihanna, and worn by her to the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, is heading to auction at Sotheby’s. Read all about it below.
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Just in time for the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, a dazzling, summery-hued set of jewels designed by Rihanna will be auctioned as part of Sotheby’s High Jewellery Sale in Geneva on May 12, 2026.
Debuted by RiRi herself on the Cannes red carpet back in 2017, the exclusive jewels were part of a special collaboration with the Swiss jewellery house Chopard, which premieres its annual high jewellery collections each year on the infamous Croisette.
The ‘Rihanna Loves Chopard’ designs paid homage to the musical superstars Barbadian heritage, as well as its ‘Carnival spirit’, with brightly coloured gemstones. Lot 588 in the Sotheby’s sale is comprised of spectacular demi-parure, with show-stopping bib-style necklace set with multi-shaped tsavorite and spessartite garnets, pink and yellow sapphires, blue topazes, turquoises and brilliant-cut diamonds (carrying an estimate of US$260,000 – $380,000). This is accompanied by a pair of matching earrings and a bracelet, which is being offered separately elsewhere in the sale.
“I have always been in love with Chopard’s exquisite jewellery,” Rihanna said at the time. “So to actually design a collection with them is something I still cannot believe.” The star insisted on using only fair-mined gold for the limited collection and every piece signed, numbered and marked with ‘R ❤️ C’.
The red carpet-worthy jewels were launched at Cannes with a glittering, star-studded soiree, for which Rihanna paired her designs with a pale blue gown by Dior. The event also happened to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the film festival, and marked the 20th anniversary of Chopard being an official part of the festival, too.
Incredible though they may be, these glittering pieces are merely guest stars in the Sotheby’s High Jewellery Sale, which also spotlights a selection of incredible loose diamonds – including an exceptionally rare, fancy vivid blue internally flawless diamond of 6.03 carats from the legendary Cullinan mine in South Africa (the source of the diamonds used in the British crown jewels), which will be making its auction debut (with an estimate of $9-12 million, to boot).
Other lots include a perfectly matched pair of unmounted brilliant-cut, D-colour white diamonds, each weighing 18.38 carats, mined by DeBeers from Botswana’s Jwaneng mine (another Jwaneng Diamond weighing 28.88 carats recently sold at auction for $2.6 million) and a pair of exceptional pink De Beers diamonds, weighing 1.06 and 1.10 carats. Part of the sale of the latter will be donated to The Peace Parks Foundation, a charity co-founded by the late President Nelson Mandela, which aims to protect and restore some of Africa’s most important transboundary conservation areas, safeguarding wildlife and local communities in the process.
There will also be Colombian emeralds, Ceylon sapphires and Burmese rubies in the sale, as well as outstanding signed jewels by storied houses such as Cartier, Bvlgari and Boucheron, garnered from private collections all over the world.
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