Gold, Jade, and the Fall of European Luxury: Why Eastern Materials Are Reclaiming the Throne
In September 2025, Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH and one of the richest men on earth, did something no one expected during a visit to Shanghai. He walked past his own Louis Vuitton and Dior boutiques and stepped into Laopu Gold, a Chinese heritage jewelry brand, where he reportedly lingered for half an hour, murmuring words like "exquisite" and "interesting."
That quiet afternoon in Shanghai may be remembered as the moment the old guard acknowledged what Chinese consumers already knew: the center of gravity in luxury is shifting. And it is shifting toward the very materials that have defined Chinese civilization for millennia: gold and jade.
The Numbers Behind the Narrative
The figures tell a story that would have seemed impossible even five years ago.
LVMH, the world's largest luxury conglomerate, reported an 11% revenue decline in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) in the first quarter of 2025. Its core fashion and leather goods division saw sales fall 8% in the first half of the year. Kering, parent of Gucci and Saint Laurent, fared even worse, with shares plunging roughly 60% from their 2021 peak. Gucci alone reportedly closed 18 stores in China during the first half of 2025.
Meanwhile, Laopu Gold, a brand built entirely on ancient Chinese goldsmithing techniques, posted 2025 half-year revenue of 12.35 billion RMB, a 251% increase year over year. Its net profit surged 291%. Its single-store revenue outpaced Cartier by a factor of two and Van Cleef & Arpels by three. After listing in June 2024 at 40.5 HKD per share, its stock reached 1,108 HKD within a year, a rise of over 2,600%.
And Laopu Gold is not an anomaly. It is a signal.
A Deeper Current: Gold and Jade as Cultural Identity
What makes Laopu Gold's ascent so significant is not just its financial performance. It is what the brand represents: a fundamental reorientation of how Chinese consumers define luxury.
For decades, luxury in China meant European. The aspirational purchase was a Chanel bag, a Cartier bracelet, a pair of Louboutin heels. European brands spent over a century constructing what scholars call an "Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchy," where value was inseparable from Western origin stories: Parisian ateliers, Italian leather workshops, Swiss watchmaking traditions.
That narrative is losing its hold. According to a 2025 CXG survey, 72% of Chinese consumers now say they appreciate how Chinese brands reflect local culture and heritage. Among millennials and Gen X, cultural connection is the primary driver of luxury purchases, outranking even price.
The materials at the center of this shift are gold and jade, the two substances that have defined Chinese civilization's relationship with permanence, beauty, and spiritual meaning for over 5,000 years. Together they form what is known in Chinese as 金玉良缘 (jīn yù liáng yuán), a phrase that literally means "the golden jade bond" and poetically describes the most auspicious of unions.
Gold: From Commodity to Cultural Artifact
Gold has always been central to Chinese culture, but it spent decades being treated as a commodity rather than a luxury material. Traditional gold shops sold jewelry priced by weight, with minimal design differentiation. The idea of paying significant premiums for gold craftsmanship seemed, to most consumers, like a contradiction.
Laopu Gold changed that calculus by applying what might be called the "cultural premium" approach: ancient court goldsmithing techniques like 花丝镶嵌 (huā sī xiāng qiàn, filigree inlay) and 金胎烧蓝 (jīn tāi shāo lán, gold-body enamelwork) that transform raw gold into miniature works of art. Their gross margins run above 41%, far exceeding the industry standard of 8% to 20% at traditional gold retailers. Consumers are not paying for gold per gram. They are paying for the civilization encoded in its surface.
The result is a product that satisfies two very different needs simultaneously: gold's intrinsic value as a store of wealth and the emotional value of owning something that feels rooted in thousands of years of cultural continuity. In an era of economic uncertainty, that combination is potent.
Jadeite: The Original Chinese Luxury
If gold represents the financial dimension of this cultural shift, jadeite represents its spiritual one.
Long before European luxury houses existed, long before diamonds were marketed as symbols of eternal love, jade occupied the highest seat in Chinese material culture. Confucius compared its qualities to the virtues of a noble person: warmth like benevolence, transparency like honesty, a clear tone when struck like wisdom. Han dynasty emperors were buried in jade burial suits sewn with gold thread, believing jade would preserve their souls for eternity.
That reverence never truly disappeared. It simply went dormant during the decades when Western luxury dominated Chinese aspirations. Now it is reawakening.
Jade sales in China surged 15.8% in 2023, reaching a market value exceeding 150 billion yuan. It has become China's second-largest jewelry category after gold. Notably, the growth is driven by younger consumers. Platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou have overtaken physical stores as primary channels for jade purchases, with livestream shopping making premium pieces accessible to a generation that previously associated jade with their grandmothers.
But here is what matters most for the future of luxury: unlike gold, whose value is ultimately tied to a commodity price, jadeite's value is almost entirely cultural and aesthetic. There is no "spot price" for jadeite. A single imperial green jadeite bead necklace sold for $27.4 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong. Meanwhile, a visually similar piece without the right translucency, color saturation, or provenance might sell for a fraction of that. Jadeite pricing is, as Christie's Asia jewelry head Ronny Hsu once put it, "more of an art than a science."
This makes jadeite, in many ways, the purest expression of what luxury claims to be: value derived not from raw material cost, but from rarity, beauty, cultural meaning, and the connoisseurship required to discern quality.
The Golden Jade Bond: Where These Two Materials Meet
The most compelling development in Chinese luxury jewelry is not gold alone or jadeite alone. It is their combination.
The pairing of gold and jade has roots stretching back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, when jade ceremonial objects were often mounted in gold or connected with gold wire. The concept of 金镶玉 (jīn xiāng yù, gold-inlaid jade) was revived to international attention when the 2008 Beijing Olympic medals featured a gold medal with a jade disc embedded in its center, a design that symbolized the meeting of Western and Eastern traditions of honor.
Today, the gold-and-jadeite combination is emerging as a distinct aesthetic language in the jewelry world. Where European jewelry design typically treats gold as a structural element (the setting, the chain, the clasp) and focuses attention on gemstones, Chinese jewelry design treats the relationship between gold and jade as a philosophical dialogue. Gold provides warmth, permanence, and protective structure. Jade provides coolness, spiritual depth, and living energy. The two materials complete each other the way yang completes yin.
This is not merely symbolic. In practical terms, high-karat gold settings for jadeite solve a real design challenge. Jadeite is a stone that absorbs and responds to its wearer's body chemistry over time, a phenomenon that collectors call 养玉 (yǎng yù, "nurturing jade"). Unlike the rigid platinum or white gold prong settings common in Western jewelry, gold bezels and wire-wrapped settings allow the stone to breathe and develop its characteristic luster through contact with the skin.
At TATHATĀ, we see this philosophy in action with every piece we design in-house: the silver lotus leaf that cradles a violet Pixiu jadeite carving, the gold-toned metalwork that frames an icy translucent pendant. The setting is never just a setting. It is a relationship.
What Western Luxury Got Wrong
The crisis facing European luxury houses is not simply about price sensitivity or economic downturns. It is about a fundamental mismatch between what brands are offering and what consumers now want.
Bain & Company's research identified that luxury brands have lost approximately 50 million "aspirational consumers" over the past two years. These are middle-income buyers who once formed the backbone of luxury growth. But they did not stop spending on premium goods. They shifted their spending toward products that felt more honest about where value actually resides.
As one analyst from LADYMAX observed, international luxury brands have invested heavily in entry-level products that function primarily as social symbols, without corresponding investments in craftsmanship or design innovation. A branded pendant on a simple chain. A logo-printed canvas bag. These products were engineered to be accessible, but in becoming accessible, they stopped feeling special. And when the fakes became nearly indistinguishable from the originals, the social currency of the logo itself depreciated.
Chinese consumers, who have spent the last decade in an intensive education about global luxury, are now turning that knowledge back on the brands themselves. They know what craftsmanship looks like because they have seen it in gold filigree work that takes weeks to complete. They know what rarity means because they have held a piece of old-mine Burmese jadeite and felt its weight, its coolness, its quiet depth. They are not rejecting luxury. They are demanding that luxury live up to its own promises.
The Opportunity for Jadeite in the West
Here is where the story gets interesting for those of us who work at the intersection of Eastern and Western luxury markets.
While Chinese consumers are "coming home" to their own material traditions, a parallel curiosity is growing in the West. Asprey, the storied British jeweler, recently launched an Imperial Jadeite collection after its chairman spent a decade personally collecting the stone. Tiffany & Co. has incorporated jade into its Elsa Peretti line. Van Cleef & Arpels' jade Alhambra pendants have become best-sellers in Asian markets and increasingly popular worldwide.
The West is beginning to discover what the East has known for millennia: that jadeite is not a secondary gemstone. It is arguably the most sophisticated natural material in the world of jewelry, a stone whose grading requires as much expertise as diamonds but whose aesthetic range, from icy translucent whites to saturated imperial greens to rare violet and honey tones, offers something that no single gemstone in the Western canon can match.
The challenge, and the opportunity, is education. Western consumers lack the cultural framework for understanding jadeite that Chinese consumers absorb from childhood. They need to learn what "Grade A" certification means (that the stone is natural and untreated, not a quality grade). They need to understand why two pieces that look similar can differ in value by a hundredfold. They need, in short, the kind of patient, authentic knowledge-sharing that builds real connoisseurship rather than impulse purchases.
This is the work we believe in at TATHATĀ. Every piece we offer comes with its story: where the rough stone was sourced, how it was selected, what its particular qualities signify. We believe that the rise of Eastern luxury materials is not a trend. It is a homecoming. And it is an invitation, extended to anyone willing to look deeper, to discover a tradition of beauty that has been quietly waiting for the world to catch up.
Looking Forward
The luxury industry in 2026 stands at an inflection point. European houses are adapting, some successfully, by investing in cultural sensitivity and experience-driven retail. Chinese brands are expanding outward, with Laopu Gold opening in Singapore and Hong Kong, and heritage jade houses exploring markets in Japan, Korea, and beyond.
But the deeper lesson is not about any single brand or market. It is about the nature of luxury itself. For centuries, luxury has been defined by European gatekeepers who decided which materials mattered, which craftsmanship traditions counted, and which aesthetic standards were "universal." That era is ending. In its place, a more pluralistic understanding is emerging: one where gold filigree stands alongside Swiss watchmaking, where a Burmese jadeite bangle carries the same cultural weight as a Burmese ruby ring, where luxury is measured not by the logo on the clasp but by the civilization encoded in the material.
Gold and jade have carried that civilization for five thousand years. They are not newcomers to luxury. They are its oldest practitioners, finally being recognized on the global stage.
Continue Your Journey:
→ The Jadeite Guidebook: Everything You Need to Know About Burmese Jadeite
→ What Is Grade-A Jadeite? Understanding Certification and Value