Accessories

Buying Jewelry Meant to Be Inherited

Jewellery meant to be inherited is a different purchase from jewellery meant to be loved.

What Makes a Piece an Heirloom

Expensive and heirloom are not the same category. The difference sits in construction, repairability and whether the design will still read in fifty years.

Re-Editioned Jewelry: Why Houses Revive Old Collections

Jewelry houses preserve their design heritage by reviving archive designs as re-editions, usually with changes they do not always announce.

Buying Vintage Jewelry Online Without Getting Burned

Buying vintage jewellery online is mostly a question of what the listing does not say. The checks that catch a bad piece before the money leaves.

Estate, Antique or Vintage Jewelry: What the Words Mean

Estate, antique and vintage are not synonyms, and the difference changes the price. What each word actually claims about a piece.

The Clutch Bag Edit

The clutch bag is back, in carved shells, beaded edges and evening pieces that take a strap. Shop the best clutch bags.

Animal Print Goes Handheld

Animal print has moved from statement to staple, and the bag is where it landed hardest. Leopard, python and croc embossing are now being treated as neutrals, worn with plain clothes rather than as the centre of an outfit. This edit is entirely bags, sorted so you can see how differently the same idea reads across silhouettes.

Small Bags, Big Year

Small bags have outlasted every prediction that they were a passing joke. The reason is practical as much as aesthetic: phones got bigger, but nobody wants to carry more than they have to, and a tiny bag makes an outfit look finished. This edit is a broad run of minis, from structured top handles to evening minaudieres.

ALAÏA Shoes and Bags

Azzedine Alaïa trained as a sculptor in Tunis before he ever cut a pattern, and it shows in everything the house has made since. He worked briefly at Dior, then Guy Laroche and Thierry Mugler, opened his own atelier in a Paris apartment on rue de Bellechasse in 1979, and built a body-first vocabulary that the industry has been borrowing ever since.

Andrea Gomez Shoes

Andrea Gomez studied jewellery design in Florence as a teenager, then at FIT in New York and the London College of Fashion, and worked at DKNY before launching her own shoes. She started in Caracas in 2011 with her sisters Leonor and Mariela, then relaunched the line in New York for spring 2017. Everything is made in a small family-owned factory near Alicante in Spain.

Ashna Mehta Jewelry: The Designer Behind Bag Bijoux

Ashna Mehta is a third-generation diamantaire from the Rosy Blue family, one of the largest diamond manufacturers in the world, and she founded her own jewellery brand in 2022. Her signature is Bag Bijoux, diamond charms engineered to clip onto a Birkin or Kelly and convert into pendants, developed with her sister Aria.

Amina Muaddi Heels and Shoes

Amina Muaddi was born in Romania in 1986 to a Jordanian father and a Romanian mother, studied fashion communication at IED in Milan, and worked as an assistant stylist at L'Uomo Vogue, Vogue Italia and American GQ. She then spent a year learning shoemaking from artisans in Riviera del Brenta, co-founded Oscar Tiye, left it, and launched her own label in August 2018.

Anya Hindmarch Bags

Anya Hindmarch started her label in London in 1987 at nineteen, with no design school behind her, after a year in Florence learning the leather trade from the craftsmen who worked in it. She sold her first five hundred bags through a magazine offer and used the proceeds as start-up capital.

Aliita Jewelry

Aliita was founded in Milan in 2015 by Cynthia Vilchez Castiglioni, who grew up in Maracaibo in Venezuela and studied fashion marketing at IED before working at Vionnet, Miu Miu and Jil Sander. The name is both an anagram of Italia and a Wayuu word for an important object, after the Guajiro people of Zulia where she was raised.

Alexis Bittar Jewelry

Alexis Bittar started selling vintage jewellery on St Mark's Place in Manhattan at about thirteen, and by 1990 was hand-carving Lucite in his one-bedroom apartment with no design training at all. Bergdorf Goodman's fashion director Dawn Mello discovered him in 1992, which is the placement that made the career.

Aisha Baker Jewelry

Aisha Baker is a Dubai high-jewellery house founded in 2017 by the Emirati entrepreneur Aisha Bakhtiar with the designer Hoonik Chang, who trained in jewellery at Central Saint Martins. The pieces are built as narratives, with fairy-tale and fantasy themes running through collections released in tiny editions.

Annette Ferdinandsen Jewelry

Annette Ferdinandsen trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design and found jewellery while studying studio art, which is the most useful fact about her work. Her father and grandfather were both model makers for Danish sculptors, so casting and carving are a family inheritance.

Almasika Jewelry

Catherine Sarr founded Almasika in January 2014 and debuted it at Colette in Paris, after more than a decade in the diamond and fine-jewellery industry including several years at De Beers and at LoveGold. The name joins almasi, Swahili for diamond, with sika, a word for gold across several West African languages.

Armenta Jewelry

Emily Armenta traded at Morgan Stanley, then wrote the business plan for her jewellery company as a class assignment during her MBA at Rice, and launched it in Houston in 2001. The work is built on mixing oxidised silver with gold and setting micromosaics, ancient beads and enamel patinas into it.

Amrapali Jewelry

Amrapali was founded in Jaipur in 1978 by Rajiv Arora and Rajesh Ajmera, two school friends with history degrees, no jewellery background and about four hundred rupees of savings. They started out selling carved wooden boxes, then toured rural Rajasthan buying antique tribal silver to take apart and rebuild.

Aeyde Shoes

Aeyde was founded in Berlin in spring 2015 by Luisa Dames and Constantin Langholz-Baikousis, who met in 2011 working at Zalando, where Dames ran the private-label division and its production across India, Bangladesh and China. They launched with about twelve pairs of shoes made in family-owned factories in Italy's Marche region.

Aleon Bags

Aleon is a luggage brand founded in 2017 in Davis, California by Carol Elms, who came out of the airline industry and built the line around aerospace-grade aluminium rather than moulded plastic. The name joins aluminium and eon, for cases meant to last a lifetime.

Anabela Chan Jewelry

Anabela Chan was born in Hong Kong, trained as an architect at the Bartlett and worked at Richard Rogers' practice, including on the Ground Zero project, before spending years as a print and embroidery designer for Alexander McQueen. She went back to study at the Royal College of Art, graduated in 2013, and launched a fine-jewellery house built on laboratory-grown gemstones and recycled metals.

A.Emery

Anna McLaren interned at The Row, spent 2014 to 2017 designing womenswear at the Australian retailer Witchery, and launched A.Emery in Melbourne in 2017 with six sandal styles, all of them entirely black. It is still self-funded.