“I just love finding new places to wear diamonds.”
That was Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), referring to the joys of a tiara.
Today, it isn’t just new places. It’s new people. New songs, new movies and new rap. Natural diamonds — those unique, glittering fragments that are like nothing else on Earth — have always been an integral element of popular culture. A way to get cameras to flash and heads to turn.
This is truer now than ever. In an era of individual style statements, few fashion choices says “This is who I am” quite as dramatically as a unique arrangement of priceless natural diamonds.
Take men on the red carpet. Their gems are no longer tucked into watches and the occasional tiepin. At the 2024 Met Gala, actor Andrew Scott (Fleabag; Ripley; All of Us Strangers) wore a set of three vintage Boucheron pavé diamond bee brooches, along with a vintage Boucheron fern necklace.
At the 2025 Met Gala, Lewis Hamilton wore a 1980s Briony Raymond floral brooch set with white, yellow and pink diamonds, paired with Briony Raymond Asscher-cut diamond studs.
{{/usCountry}}At the 2025 Met Gala, Lewis Hamilton wore a 1980s Briony Raymond floral brooch set with white, yellow and pink diamonds, paired with Briony Raymond Asscher-cut diamond studs.
{{/usCountry}}A$AP Rocky arrived in Bvlgari High jewellery, wearing a necklace studded with pavé diamonds, along with diamond earrings and rings, and carrying a custom Briony Raymond umbrella set with 90 carats of diamonds.
Also at the 2025 Met Gala, model Hailey Bieber paired her Saint Laurent look with Tiffany & Co diamonds, including a necklace centred on a 25-carat diamond. And actor Priyanka Chopra has talked repeatedly about her love for diamonds, and how she buys her own, as gifts to herself.
The list goes on and on...
THE REAL DEAL
Because every natural diamond has a story to tell, they make great stars in their own right too.
They are the subjects of songs, and heists; they are the ultimate symbols of success.
Marylin Fitoussi, costume designer for Emily in Paris (2020-), has called them the secret weapon in the arsenal of her show. In the world of hip hop, where they have long signalled a kind of peak success, they have been the embodiment of bling since that term was first popularised by rappers in the late 1990s.
The legends behind certain gems translate beautifully on-screen.
Think of the gray-blue Hope Diamond, said to be from India’s Kollur mine, which entered France’s royal collection in 1668, was lost during the French Revolution, resurfaced in London, was acquired by millionaire banker and gem collector Henry Philip Hope, then Cartier, until the legendary New York jeweller Harry Winston finally donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958.
The 45.52-carat gem inspired the glittering blue diamond at the heart of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic, where it represents love, longing, desire: as it is translated onto canvas, misused, misplaced, and finally dropped into the ocean, concluding an epic love story.
TREASURE HUNTS
It isn’t easy to translate this level of muchness onto the screen.
In certain scenes in the series Downton Abbey (2010-15), for instance, London’s royal jewellers had to pitch in, loaning vintage pieces from tiaras to cuffs.
In the lavishly produced Baz Luhrmann film The Great Gatsby (2013), it took a partnership with Tiffany & Co to bring the opulence of the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age to life.
Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) featured millions of dollars’ worth of designer diamond jewellery. There is so much at stake, on sets like these, that security teams, anti-burglary systems, access and crowd control have to be redrawn.
And then of course there are the movies about diamonds.
Numerous James Bonds, from Sean Connery in 1971 (Diamonds are Forever) to Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day (2002) chase these gems around the world.
From Matt Damon and George Clooney in Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) to Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock in Ocean’s 8 (2018), jewel thieves risk their lives for this ultimate prize.
In Ocean’s Thirteen, the gang has been betrayed by a casino owner and decides to avenge themselves by taking a cache of diamonds worth hundreds of millions from his Vegas casino, and replacing the jewels with fakes.
In Ocean’s 8, Blanchett and Bullock, with a team of eventually six other women, decide to stage the audacious heist of a historic Cartier diamond necklace at the Met Gala. Once they have it, they swiftly take it apart, pocket a piece each, and disappear into the night.
STARS IN THEIR EYES
Back to the red carpet, in a reel-to-real moment that would have left Monroe’s diamond-loving characters amazed, Elizabeth Taylor wore an antique diamond tiara, a gift from her then-husband producer Mike Todd, to the 1957 Oscars. She would make news, over and over, through the years, for her collection of these gems, gifted to her by her spouses (she married eight times).
“How many young women… win a diamond ring at ping pong with their husband? Well, I did, and for all of these memories and the people in my life I feel blessed,” she once said.
As for the original Monroe tribute, Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend (from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), it lives on, in cover songs, spinoffs, advertising and cinema.
The film Moulin Rouge! (2001), which incidentally used custom-made jewellery created in the Edwardian style for its lavish scenes, recreated that number in a spectacular sequence.
It found echoes in Madonna’s Material Girl (1984), and more recently in B-Day Song (2012; featuring MIA; from the album MDNA): “I want a diamond / Don’t give me a fake,” the icon sings.
That’s the heart of it all, isn’t it? The natural diamond is synonymous with luxury, success, desire. Can you imagine Matt Damon risking his freedom, or Monroe and Madonna singing, about something that could be replicated in a lab?