The Ginza Maison is Van Cleef & Arpels' principal address in Tokyo — the space that welcomes the full range of jewellery, fine jewellery and timepiece collections in a setting conceived for the presentation of the House's most important pieces. Van Cleef & Arpels has been present in Japan since 1974 — before Cartier, before all the great French jewellery Houses that would arrive only in the years that followed. This precedence is not a chronological detail. It means that the Japanese fine jewellery clientele encountered Van Cleef & Arpels before encountering its direct competitors — and that the relationship between the House and the Japanese market was built over half a century, with the depth of anchorage that this duration produces. The Ginza Six boutique — also present in this network — completes the principal address within the environment of Tokyo's most frequented luxury mall.

In 2025, Van Cleef & Arpels presented at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum the Timeless Art Deco exhibition — two hundred and fifty jewels, watches and art objects selected from the House's heritage collection and private collections, accompanied by sixty archival documents. The exhibition commemorates the centenary of the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, where Van Cleef & Arpels had won the Grand Prix for the Fleurs enlacées bracelet, red and white roses — a piece which constitutes, according to the House, one of the essential keys to understanding its vision in the Art Deco era. The Teien Museum, former residence of Prince Asaka, is itself an Art Deco masterpiece — built in 1933, the exact year Van Cleef & Arpels registered the Serti Mystérieux patent. The exhibition within this building says something precise: the House's Art Deco style and Japanese Art Deco developed simultaneously, in the same decade, with the same passion for surfaces, geometries and the mastery of materials.

Van Cleef & Arpels fine jewellery is the only one of its kind to have made poetry — rather than technique, prestige or history — its primary register. The House's sources of inspiration are nature, dance, fairy tales, love, luck: emotional territories translated into jewels. The Alhambra, created in 1968 by Jacques Arpels, is a four-leaf clover — symbol of luck — declined since then in mother-of-pearl, onyx, malachite, coral, precious stones, in a fifty-seven-year continuity that makes it one of the longest-running jewellery collections in history. The Zip necklace, inspired by the Duchess of Windsor in 1939 and realised in 1951, is a zip fastener in diamonds and coloured stones that transforms into a bracelet — the transformable piece taken to its apogee. The ballerinas, born in the nineteen-forties in New York under the impulsion of Louis Arpels, passionate about dance, are platinum, gold and diamond clips representing dancers in their different positions — a narrative jewellery that resembles no other.

Louis Arpels had been passionate about dance since the nineteen-forties, when he created in New York the first ballet dancer jewels. His son Claude Arpels met George Balanchine, choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet. From this encounter was born in 1967 the ballet Jewels — a work in three acts, each structured by a precious stone: Rubies, Emeralds, Diamonds. It is the first ballet to have been directly inspired by jewellery and to have made it its compositional principle. The collaboration between Van Cleef & Arpels and the world of dance did not stop there — in 2012, the House worked with Benjamin Millepied and his L.A. Dance Project company. This territory — dance as a source of jewellery inspiration — is consistent with the House's approach from its origins: Van Cleef & Arpels jewels are conceived for movement, for the body that moves, for the woman who dances rather than the one who poses. The Japanese clientele, in a country where dance and the bodily arts have a millennial tradition and a gestural precision recognised throughout the world, understands this logic in a particularly direct way.

The Minaudière was born of an observation by Charles Arpels. He saw his friend Florence Jay Gould — one of the great society figures of the interwar years — tipping indiscriminately into her evening bag a lipstick, a powder compact, cigarettes and a lighter. He proposed a precious metal box, compartmentalised, that would contain all of this with the elegance the situation required. The Minaudière was born — a rigid box in precious metal, with its interior compartments, carried in the hand or at the wrist like a small sculpture. Its name comes from the French verb "minauder" — to simper, to put on airs — because Charles Arpels had observed that women who carried it tended to show it off, to play with it, to place it ostentatiously on tables. Before the leather evening bag, before satin clutches, the Van Cleef & Arpels Minaudière was the first feminine fashion object to have organised the contents of an evening in a precious form. It is still produced today, in the ateliers at 22 place Vendôme, to order and as unique pieces for the House's most faithful clients.

In 2012, Van Cleef & Arpels founded in Paris the École des Arts Joailliers — a teaching and transmission space open to the public, offering introductory courses in jewellery, the history of precious stones, and atelier techniques. This is not a professional school for jewellers — it is a cultural institution whose mission is to share with the general public the knowledge of the savoir-faire that makes possible what the House produces. The École organises travelling exhibitions in several cities around the world, including Tokyo. This approach is consistent with the House's identity since its founding: Van Cleef & Arpels is the only great jewellery House to have systematically accompanied its commercial development with a cultural programme of transmission — exhibitions at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum, and now the Teien Museum in Tokyo. Jewellery is not only an object to be bought. It is a practice to be understood.