Haute Victoire

Haute Victoire

Yasmina Benazzou spent over two decades as global creative director at the carpet house Tai Ping before signing up for an evening jewelry-making class in New York at 45, which led her to found Haute Victoire. The name means high victory in French, chosen because launching the label felt like a personal win after years spent designing something else entirely, and her debut collections were worked in 18k gold set with Tahitian pearls, Persian turquoise and stones pulled from flea-market brooches.

Jewelry

Benazzou's path into fine jewelry ran through a gemology course at FIT, not a design school, and the pieces still carry that hands-on, slightly self-taught specificity: cast gold bases, single statement pearls, forms she has compared to agar wood. It reads as personal rather than formulaic, which tracks with a designer who named the label after her own sense of accomplishment.

More Jewelry

A further stretch of jewelry leans on her habit of repurposing found objects, vintage coins, stones lifted from old hairpins and brooches, into new settings. It is a very Parisian-flea-market instinct applied inside a New York studio, and it keeps the collection from feeling like it was designed to a brief.

Our honest take

Haute Victoire is a genuine career-change story, not a marketing one, and that shows in how specific the design references are: a Tony-Vaccaro-adjacent nostalgia for chic women of the 1950s and 60s rather than a generic mood board. The label is still small enough that the founder's own taste is doing most of the work, for better or worse.