AKANO's Omenala Collection Brings Igbo Heritage to Paris High Jewellery

At The Peninsula Paris on the night of March 4, harpist Jehanne Drai played a nuanced, contemporary set in the hotel's Rotunda while guests moved between cocktails and a private viewing of something genuinely new in haute joaillerie: an African high-jewellery house, presenting in Paris, on its own terms.

The house is AKANO, founded and led by Akunna Nwala-Akano, and the collection is called Omenala, a word that translates to "heritage" in the Igbo language. The debut marked AKANO's formal European introduction during Paris Fashion Week, organized in partnership with Vogue100, Vogue's global community of influential women shaping fashion, culture, and business. Guests, among them international editors, collectors, cultural figures, and fashion insiders, arrived courtesy of Wheely, the luxury chauffeur service. The evening concluded with a private viewing that allowed each attendee to examine the craftsmanship and symbolism of individual pieces with Nwala-Akano directly.

The collection draws from Igbo cosmology, West African motifs, and the founder's own family memories, translating those references into sculptural forms defined by architectural balance, tension, and movement. "Heritage is not static," Nwala-Akano said at the presentation. "It evolves with us. With Omenala, I wanted to create a body of work that honours where we come from while imagining what legacy looks like in the future. These jewels are not simply adornments; they are vessels of memory, identity and possibility."

That ambition is legible in the specific pieces. The Idenmili necklace, set in 18K gold, combines yellow and white diamonds with pearls, rubellites, rubies, and tsavorites on a single structure, a layering of materials that reads almost geological in its range. The Akupe earrings, also 18K gold, pair diamonds with Mehenge spinels, a pairing that favors deep color saturation over conventional gemstone hierarchies. The Mkpulu necklace anchors diamonds with emeralds in a form that photographers including Katerina Perez have documented in circulation since the presentation. All three pieces use high-carat diamonds alongside colored stones set into bold, architectural silhouettes intended to evoke ceremonial jewellery traditions while reading as decisively contemporary.

The positioning of AKANO within the industry carries its own weight. Africa produces diamonds in Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia; stones are cut and polished on the continent, yet high-jewellery brands that use them have historically been headquartered in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, or Asia. Nwala-Akano's house directly disrupts that pattern. Paris Fashion Week, which generates an estimated 1.2 billion euros annually in wholesale sales and ancillary goods and services across its various iterations, is not a neutral stage, and presenting there signals a deliberate claim on the haute joaillerie conversation rather than an entry into it.

What the Omenala collection ultimately argues, across its 18K settings and its spinels and its Igbo cosmological references, is that legacy is not a preservation project. It is, as Nwala-Akano put it, something lived rather than archived, evolving with the maker who carries it forward.