Pomellato's Ninth Annual Campaign Confronts Economic Violence Against Women

Nine years into its International Women's Day advocacy, Pomellato trained its 2026 campaign on a form of abuse that leaves no physical mark: economic violence. The Italian jewellery house launched the latest edition of its Pomellato for Women platform on March 5, with a choral video assembling voices from culture, sport, entrepreneurship, and civil society to argue that financial autonomy is inseparable from dignity itself.

At the center of the film is Jane Fonda, the Academy Award winner who has served as a longtime ambassador of the platform. She is joined by actors Kerry Washington and Michelle Monaghan, Italian cinema talents Benedetta Porcaroli and Isabella Ferrari, model and mental health advocate Amelia Gray, entrepreneur Sara Nuru, and Japanese volleyball captain Mayu Ishikawa. The breadth of the cast is intentional: economic control touches women across every geography and profession.

The campaign is grounded in research commissioned by Pomellato and conducted by SDA Bocconi School of Management, which identified three recurring patterns through which economic violence operates. Restriction describes the limiting or monitoring of a woman's access to money, accounts, and financial decision-making. Sabotage covers the deliberate undermining of education, work, or opportunity to prevent independence. Exploitation refers to the use of a woman's resources, income, or labor to entrench an unequal balance of power. The research underscores that these dynamics rarely arrive as isolated incidents; they are sustained patterns that normalize dependence and make leaving progressively more difficult.

"Economic violence is invisible, but its impact is devastating," said Sabina Belli, CEO of Pomellato. "When a woman loses her economic freedom, she loses the power to choose her own life. Financial independence is dignity. It is the foundation of true freedom."

Belli has led the Pomellato for Women initiative since its 2017 inception, steering its annual themes from a call for sisterhood in 2018 to a focus on diversity and inclusion in 2020. The 2026 edition is the most legally and structurally specific the campaign has been, naming financial control as a category of gender-based violence rather than addressing empowerment in broader terms.

The campaign also points toward a tension that is easy to misread in everyday life: the line where care becomes control, and where support slides into dependence. That framing gives the video its sharpest edge, asking audiences to consider arrangements that may not register as abusive precisely because they are dressed in the language of provision.

Pomellato continued its longstanding support of organisations working directly with survivors, including CADMI, the Casa di Accoglienza delle Donne Maltrattate, and FreeFrom, a partner of the Kering Foundation. The pairing of a luxury platform with direct survivor services is the campaign's implicit argument made concrete: awareness without infrastructure changes little.