Hermès Into the Horsescape: Inside the House’s Boldest High Jewelry Collection Yet

Hermès has always had a peculiar talent for turning saddle straps into status symbols. So it should surprise no one that its newest high jewelry collection finds the maison once again looking to the stable for inspiration. Hermès Into the Horsescape, the house’s ninth haute bijouterie collection, unveiled during Paris Haute Couture Week, takes the horse, Hermès’ founding symbol since 1837, and does something almost contrarian with it: it barely shows the animal at all.

Designed by Pierre Hardy, Creative Director of Hermès Jewelry, the 90-piece collection trades literal horse imagery for something more abstract and, frankly, more interesting. Bits, bridles, lassos, stirrups, horseshoes, and blacksmith’s nails, the unglamorous hardware of equestrian life, get reimagined as sculptural, wearable jewels. It’s a clever bit of restraint from a house that could easily lean on its logo and call it a day. Instead, Into the Horsescape asks you to look closer, and once you do, the horse is suddenly everywhere.

The Concept Behind Into the Horsescape

Pierre Hardy has described Into the Horsescape as a “metonymical” collection, meaning the horse is represented not by its image but by the objects and gestures associated with it. As Hardy put it, the animal itself is barely seen, but its symbolism lives within each piece, sometimes literally, sometimes sliding into pure metaphor. That’s a fairly academic way of saying something simple: instead of putting a horse on a necklace, Hardy took apart the entire world around the horse, the tack, the tools, the choreography of movement, and rebuilt it in diamonds and gold.

It’s worth remembering that Hermès didn’t start as a jewelry house, or even a fashion house. It began in 1837 making harnesses and saddles for Europe’s equestrian elite, decades before the Birkin, the Kelly, or the silk scarves that would eventually define the brand. Hermès Into the Horsescape leans directly into that origin story, treating equestrian equipment not as decoration but as design language. A bit becomes the curve that frames an emerald. A lasso loosens into a ribbon of baguette-cut diamonds. A stirrup gets reduced to its most essential structural line. Even the humble blacksmith’s nail, the kind that fastens a horseshoe, gets reborn as one of the collection’s brightest pieces.

Movement is the other big idea running through the entire collection. Hardy built the 90 creations around articulated constructions and flexible mechanisms designed to move naturally with the body. Some stones are even partially hidden at rest, only catching the light and revealing themselves once the piece is in motion. It’s a small design choice, but it says a lot about the collection’s overall attitude. Nothing here is trying too hard to be noticed. It would rather earn your attention slowly.

Standout Pieces From the Collection

With 90 one-of-a-kind creations, the collection covers a lot of ground, but a handful of pieces stand out as its clearest thesis statements.

Étreintes

Étreintes reinterprets the horse bit through sweeping, continuous lines set with exceptional emeralds and diamonds. Rather than replicating the bit’s actual shape, Hardy pulls out its essential curve and stretches it into something closer to an embrace (fittingly, “étreintes” translates to “embraces” in French), which is a clever bit of wordplay for a piece inspired by a tool designed to guide and hold.

Lasso Disco

Lasso Disco is one of the more purely joyful pieces in the collection. It recreates the swinging motion of a lasso using precisely arranged baguette-cut diamonds, capturing that mid-air loop of rope in a way that feels kinetic even sitting still. It’s proof that Hardy’s abstraction doesn’t sacrifice storytelling; you can look at this piece with zero context and still sense the motion it’s referencing.

Attelage d’Or

Attelage d’Or draws from the bridles and harness buckles central to Hermès’ original leather-making business, translating that hardware into gold with the kind of structural confidence you’d expect from a house that spent a century perfecting saddlery before it ever touched a gemstone.

Sellette

Sellette might be the most conceptually rich piece in the entire collection. It transforms an actual eighteenth-century miniature saddle from the Émile Hermès Collection, the house’s private archive, into a bracelet crafted from gold, diamonds, and satin-finished titanium. It’s a rare case of Into the Horsescape reaching directly into Hermès’ own history rather than simply gesturing at equestrian culture in general, and it gives the whole collection a sense of lineage.

Clou de Forge Lumière

Clou de Forge Lumière takes the blacksmith’s nail, about as unglamorous an object as exists in the equestrian world, and turns it into one of the collection’s most luminous pieces. Using Hermès’ signature pavage matière technique, diamonds are set to create a seamless, radiant surface, so that a tool once used to fasten horseshoes ends up looking like it’s casting its own light. It’s a neat encapsulation of the entire collection’s guiding idea: the ordinary rebuilt as the extraordinary.

Galop Hermès

Galop Hermès breaks from the collection’s general abstraction and gives you the horse itself, sculptural profiles rendered with exceptional sapphires and gradients of white and brown diamonds that echo the natural tones of a horse’s coat. After 89 other pieces spent working in metaphor, Galop Hermès feels almost like a reveal, the moment the collection finally lets you see what it’s been circling around the entire time.

Cavale

Cavale closes out the collection on a quieter note, playing with illusion through carefully graded white and brown diamonds. After so many pieces built around literal equestrian hardware, Cavale feels like the collection exhaling, proof that Hardy’s real interest here was never the objects themselves but the sense of motion and freedom they represent.

Materials and Craftsmanship

Beyond diamonds, Hermès Into the Horsescape draws on an unusually broad material palette for a house known for restraint: emeralds, black jade, tourmalines, moonstones, opals, and satin-finished titanium all make appearances alongside the expected white and brown diamonds. Hermès has said gemstone selection across the collection prioritizes each stone’s role within the overall design composition rather than rarity for its own sake.

There’s also something to be said for how Hermès Into the Horsescape was presented. The collection debuted during Paris Haute Couture Week, placing it directly alongside the season’s biggest fashion moments rather than treating jewelry as a separate, secondary category. That timing matters. It put Into the Horsescape in conversation with the same week’s couture collections, reinforcing the idea that Hermès sees its high jewelry as a design discipline on equal footing with anything happening on a runway, not an accessory line trailing behind it.

Final Thoughts

What makes Hermès Into the Horsescape genuinely compelling isn’t the scale of it, though 90 one-of-a-kind pieces is nothing to scoff at; it’s the discipline. Equestrian references are an easy trap for a house like Hermès to fall into, tipping quickly into costume-y heritage nostalgia. Pierre Hardy avoids that trap almost entirely by keeping the horse offstage for most of the collection, letting its presence live in tension, structure, and motion rather than in literal imagery.

By the time you reach pieces like Galop Hermès or Cavale, the restraint of everything before them makes those more figurative moments land harder. Hermès Into the Horsescape isn’t trying to convince you that Hermès loves horses; that much was already obvious. Instead, it’s asking you to consider how deeply that history is embedded in the house’s design instincts, down to the curve of a bit or the swing of a lasso.

It’s a smart, patient collection, and one that rewards a second and third look far more than a first glance ever could. Whether your entry point is the sculptural drama of Galop Hermès, the archival weight of Sellette, or the pure kinetic fun of Lasso Disco, Into the Horsescape makes a convincing case that after nearly two centuries, Hermès still has new ways to talk about the animal that started it all.

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All images courtesy of Hermès