Couture Design Awards honor diamond ring wins and emotional tributes

A tearful tribute to Beth Anne Bonanno framed a night that still kept diamonds at the center of couture’s design conversation, with Zahn-Z’s Big Zaha Art Deco ring taking Best in Diamonds Below $40,000 Retail. The 2026 Couture Design Awards unfolded Saturday night at the Encore Theater in Las Vegas, where 12 judge-selected categories and two voter-driven honors, Editor’s Choice and People’s Choice, turned the room into a live reading of what high-jewelry buyers are likely to want next.

The evening opened by honoring Mildred Marcano, director of sales and marketing at Reinhold Jewelers in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the first Jan Mohr Award for Excellence, then closed with Bonanno of The Gems Project receiving the Cindy Edelstein Award. Between those emotional bookends, the awards behaved less like a formal gala and more like a working forecast for couture jewelry, with the strongest signals coming from pieces that balanced technical craft with a clear point of view. The competition is open only to participating COUTURE designers and brands, which makes the results a concentrated look at the houses already shaping the category.

Hiba Husayni, the Syrian-American architect and fine jewelry designer behind New York City-based ZAHN-Z, also won a Couture Design Award for the second year in a row. Her brand’s Big Zaha Art Deco ring offered the clearest design thesis of the night: 18K two-tone yellow and white gold, blackened gold with a high-polish finish, a .98-carat old European cut diamond, and additional round and pear-cut diamonds. The mix reads as architectural rather than ornamental, with contrast and line doing as much work as carat weight.

That matters because the award categories themselves still divide diamonds by retail tier, above and below $40,000, a reminder that couture is not just about singular showpieces. It is also about how designers make diamond jewelry feel collectible at different price points. Husayni’s win suggests that the next wave of diamond styling may lean into antique-cut stones, mixed metals, and darker metal accents that sharpen the silhouette, while custom commissions may increasingly ask for rings that look engineered rather than simply set. For retailers, the message is equally direct: the best couture diamond buys will be the ones that sell design language as confidently as they sell the stone.