Brand Deep-Dive

The Diamond That Went Public

By ORBIS Editorial · Reviewed 26 July 2026

August 22, 2026 · 1 min read · ORBIS Editorial

Harry Winston opened his jewelry company in New York in 1932, moving from diamond dealing into designing and selling jewelry under his own name from a Fifth Avenue salon. He built his reputation the way dealers rarely do twice: by handling the stones nobody else could afford to be wrong about.

In 1949 he bought the 45.52-carat Hope Diamond, the deep-blue stone whose ownership history had already accumulated a century of rumor. Most jewelers who buy a stone like that spend the rest of their career selling it in pieces or keeping it under guard. Winston did neither. In 1958 he donated it outright to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The gift became the founding centerpiece of the Smithsonian's National Gem Collection, and the Hope Diamond has stayed on public display there ever since, seen by more people in a single afternoon than most jewels are seen by in a century. A stone built to be locked in a vault instead became the public centerpiece of a national gem collection.

Winston's Paris presence dates to the early 1960s, when he opened a salon at 29 Avenue Montaigne, in the stretch of the 8th arrondissement that holds the city's major couture and jewelry houses; Winston himself presented collections there in person. The salon was renovated in 2014 and remains the house's flagship high-jewelry address in the city. The company has also loaned jewelry for Academy Awards ceremonies for decades — a smaller, annual echo of the same instinct that sent the Hope Diamond into a museum rather than a safe: if a stone is going to be famous, let it be seen.

Go to Avenue Montaigne for the craft. Go to Washington to see what the house's most famous purchase actually looks like when nobody has to buy it.

Paris

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