Pomellato Style — Milanese Goldwork and the Cabochon Vernacular
Pomellato Style — Milanese Goldwork and the Cabochon Vernacular
The design language Pino Rabolini built into a house, and the wider Italian aesthetic it shaped
Pomellato style is the design vernacular established by the Milanese house Pomellato from its founding in 1967 by Pino Rabolini, characterised by sculptural goldwork, large cabochon coloured stones, a marked preference for smoky and earth-toned material, and a deliberate departure from the precious-stone hierarchies of mid-century French and Anglo-American high jewellery. The style has been influential well beyond the maison itself, shaping a recognisable strand of Italian design and informing how cabochon-led, colour-first jewellery is built across the contemporary trade.
Origins and the Rabolini idea
Pino Rabolini founded Pomellato in Milan in 1967 with a stated intention to bring the language of prêt-à-porter into fine jewellery. Where the Place Vendôme houses of the period were producing one-off high-jewellery commissions in mounted-diamond traditions inherited from the nineteenth century, Rabolini conceived a house whose collections would be designed in series, produced to a consistent goldsmithing standard, and worn day-to-day rather than reserved for evening. The house's early production established a goldwork vocabulary — heavy, sculptural, often layered — that became its signature.
A second decision shaped the aesthetic as much as the production model: the systematic use of large coloured stones in cuts that prioritised body colour and tactility over faceted brilliance. Cabochon, sugarloaf, and lozenge cushion shapes recur throughout the maison's catalogue, set into bezels that emphasise the stone's silhouette rather than disappearing behind a pavé framework. The combination of weighty gold and matte-to-glossy cabochon produced a look that read immediately as Italian and as Pomellato.
The smoky palette
Pomellato is identified more closely than any other house with a smoky and earth-toned colour palette: smoky quartz, brown and cognac diamond, citrine in caramel and sherry tones, prasiolite, and the rose-to-lilac end of amethyst. The Nudo collection, launched in 2001, is the most-cited example — a single faceted stone in a bezel of rose or white gold, deliberately spare, and offered in a colour spectrum that places brown and amber on equal footing with conventional precious species.
This palette mattered commercially as well as aesthetically. By treating quartz, citrine, and brown diamond as primary materials rather than as substitutes for ruby or emerald, the house opened the high-jewellery silhouette to a price tier that traditional precious-stone construction had excluded. The strategy is consistent with the broader 1970s Italian movement to democratise gold jewellery, and Pomellato sits alongside Bvlgari and Buccellati in the Milanese-Roman cohort that reframed Italian goldwork for a postwar luxury market.
Construction and goldwork
Pomellato's goldwork is the second pillar of the style. The house uses substantial gauges and visible construction — collet-set bezels, articulated link chains, and faceted gold surfaces that catch light independently of the stone. Rose gold, particularly in the warmer Italian alloys, is associated with the house, though white and yellow gold appear throughout the catalogue. Hand-finishing is consistent across collections: bezels are filed and polished by hand, and the inside of a Pomellato piece typically carries the same surface quality as the outside.
The construction philosophy aligns with the broader Italian tradition exemplified by Buccellati's engraving and Bvlgari's tubogas, but Pomellato's contribution is specifically in the marriage of sculptural collet bezels to large-cabochon coloured stones. The Iconica, Sabbia, and M'ama Non M'ama lines extend the same vocabulary across price tiers and stone selections.
Influence on the wider trade
The Pomellato style has shaped Italian jewellery design across two generations. The cabochon-led colour-stone bezel and the smoky palette were widely adopted by Italian makers in the 1980s and 1990s, and the language remains visible in the work of Pasquale Bruni, Marco Bicego, and Vhernier, each of whom developed their own variations on weighty Italian gold and large coloured stones. The maison itself was acquired by the Kering group in 2013, and continues under creative direction that has remained recognisably within the founding aesthetic.
Beyond Italy, the influence is visible in any contemporary high-jewellery design that prioritises a single sculptural cabochon over a pavé matrix, or that treats brown and earth-toned material as serious rather than secondary. The shift in the broader trade toward collectible cognac diamond, rose-cut smoky quartz, and large cabochon citrine in fine work reflects, in part, the success of the Pomellato argument.
In the trade
For dealers and clients, the Pomellato signature is recognisable in three features in combination: the substantial gold, the sculptural bezel, and the cabochon or lozenge cushion in a non-traditional colour. Vintage Pomellato of the 1970s and 1980s trades actively in the secondary market, with the early sugarloaf collections and the original Sabbia pieces holding particular interest among collectors of Italian goldwork. The house's auction record is strongest for early work and for pieces whose construction reflects the founder-era methods.