Elizabeth Taylor Diamond (Krupp)

Thirty-three carats, Asscher-cut, set as a ring large enough that its owner once offered to let a stranger try it on at a party — and meant it. The stone that the world came to call the Krupp belonged, for the better part of four decades, to a woman who understood that a diamond is only as alive as the life lived around it.

It came to her in 1968, and she wore it constantly — on film sets, on yachts, across borders, as casually as other people wear a watch. She liked to say that a great stone should be looked at and enjoyed, not locked away, and she lived by it. The Asscher cut rewarded that closeness. Its concentric, stepped facets pull the eye down into the stone in a series of squared rings — the famous “hall of mirrors” — so that the longer you look, the deeper it goes.

When the diamond returned to auction in 2011, after her death, it set a record for its kind. But the figure was never really the point. What collectors were bidding on was the forty years of evenings the stone had presided over, the sense that to own it was to inherit a certain fearlessness about beauty.

That is the aspiration the Asscher still carries: geometry with nerve. It is the cut for someone who wants the precision of straight lines and the drama of real depth in the same stone — modern and antique at once, quiet until the light moves.

Legacy’s Asscher and step-cut diamonds follow that same discipline. A selection from the vault appears below; for a particular size or clarity, speak with our atelier and we will source it for you.