Accessories
Accessories
Heaven Mayhem Jewelry
Pia Mance started Heaven Mayhem in Los Angeles in 2022 with a small amount of starting capital, hand-tying cord necklaces from vintage pendants she sourced herself and packing every order alone. A chance run-in with Hailey Bieber at an LA coffee shop in 2023 turned the brand's earrings into a recurring celebrity fixture and pushed it into wider retail.
Julietta Jewelry
Juliana Liden, a Brazil-born, Brooklyn-based self-taught designer, launched Julietta in 2021 after an earlier hair-accessories line failed to catch on. She pivoted to jewelry in 2022, hand-painting and reworking a stash of deadstock 1980s components into sculptural, earth- and sea-themed pieces that Moda Operandi picked up as its first global stockist.
Renato Cipullo Jewelry
Renato Cipullo was born in Naples and grew up in Rome in a family of jewelers, later opening a boutique on Ischia in 1967 before settling in New York, where his brother Aldo designed Cartier's Love bracelet. He launched his own jewelry collection in 1974, drawing on years spent by the sea for motifs in shell, coral and gold that still recur in his work.
Fiametta: Lab-Grown Diamond Jewelry by Merill Hollander
Merill Hollander founded Fiametta in New York in 2023 after a career that started at Bloomingdale's buying desk and ran through a Wharton MBA. The label works exclusively in lab-grown diamonds and frames itself as a rewrite of fine jewelry's rulebook, drawing openly on Hollander's experience as a queer woman deciding which traditions to keep and which to drop.
Jia Jia Jewelry
Jia Jia was founded in February 2020 by Jia-Jia Zhu, a former fashion buyer at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue who left retail to study yoga and crystals in Bali before turning that interest into a jewelry line. The brand's signature is raw, uncut and unpolished crystal set into 14k and 18k gold, a deliberately unfinished look that treats the stone as the whole point rather than something to be smoothed over.
Sylvia Toledano Jewelry
Sylvia Toledano grew up in Paris with a childhood spent partly in Africa, studied law, then trained in style and sculpture before launching her own jewelry line around 2007 or 2008. She calls her aesthetic neo-vintage, pieces handmade in patinated, textured gilded brass and set with semi-precious stones, and her boutique still sits near Place Vendôme on rue Danielle Casanova.
Marie Mas Jewelry
Marie Mas was founded in Paris in January 2017 by Marie Cabirou, who trained at the Ecole Duperre and the Institut Francais de la Mode before spending several years designing jewelry under Raf Simons at Christian Dior Couture. She named the house after her maternal grandmother, Henriette Mas, and built its identity around a patented technique that lets a stone physically swing between two settings, an idea she traces to watching Christmas tree worms move underwater.
Cult Gaia Bags and Dresses
Jasmin Larian started Cult Gaia in 2012, making flower crowns and wired-fabric headbands for friends around New York while she was training at FIT. The label found its real signature in the bamboo Ark bag, a sculptural, unmistakable shape that turned a slow-burning accessory into one of the decade's most photographed bags and pushed the brand into ready-to-wear, footwear and eventually bridal.
Janessa Leone
Janessa Leone launched her eponymous hat line in Los Angeles in 2013, funded with personal savings from years of nannying while she considered law school. The origin story is oddly literal: on a trip to Paris she bought a vintage men's hat, opened the sweatband, and found the milliner's surname stitched inside, the same as her own.
Moncler Grenoble: Vests, Jackets and Mountain Wear
Moncler was founded in 1952 in Monestier-de-Clermont, a mountain village near Grenoble, France, by René Ramillon and André Vincent, originally making sleeping bags and tents for high-altitude workers before down jackets followed. The Grenoble name commemorates 1968, when Moncler outfitted the French downhill ski team at the Grenoble Winter Olympics, and the Grenoble line itself later launched as a dedicated technical collection built for the slopes and apres-ski rather than city streets.
Tom Ford
Tom Ford trained as an architect at Parsons School of Design before joining Gucci in 1990, a house then weighed down by family disputes and near insolvency, and rose to Creative Director by 1994, driving sales up roughly ninety percent within two years. He left Gucci Group in 2004 after a contract dispute and launched his own label in 2005, opening a Madison Avenue flagship in 2007 built around the same architectural rigor and unapologetic glamour he brought to Gucci.
Bembien Bags and Shoes
Yi-Mei Truxes launched Bembien in 2017 in Brooklyn after six years running marketing for Vogue, following a chance sighting of a stranger's disheveled straw bag on a downtown street. The label works almost entirely through artisan weavers in Bali, treating a basket bag as a craft object rather than a factory good
KATKIM Jewelry
Katherine Kim launched KATKIM in New York in the fall of 2015 after training in graphic design in Pasadena and then jewelry at Central Saint Martins in London and the Fashion Institute of Technology. The brand is built around a single idea she developed at her kitchen table, the Ear Pin, a slim gold spear that threads through the piercing and locks behind the ear, since multiplied into diamond-paved and petite versions.
Gucci
Guccio Gucci opened his first shop on Florence's Via della Vigna Nuova in 1921, selling leather luggage after years spent watching wealthy travelers as a porter at London's Savoy Hotel. The house has since run through family ownership, a very public 1990s implosion, and a run of creative directors, Tom Ford, Frida Giannini, Alessandro Michele, Sabato De Sarno and now Demna, each of whom rebuilt its image without ever discarding the leather-goods core Guccio started with.
Emily P. Wheeler
Emily P. Wheeler started making beaded jewelry for her mother as a child on Southwest road trips with her architectural-photographer father, and introduced her fine jewelry line in 2017. She trained at the GIA as a colored-gemstone specialist, and it shows in a palette built around saturated stones rather than pure diamond sparkle
Eden Presley
Gwen Myers started making jewelry in New York as a way to fill the hours at home with three young children, and named the label after two of them, Eden and Presley. What began as pieces for herself and friends grew into informal jewelry parties before it turned into an actual wholesale business, hand-set gemstones in 14k gold with a bold, maximalist streak.
Sydney Evan Jewelry
Rosanne Karmes founded Sydney Evan in Los Angeles in 2001, naming it after her two children, Sydney and Evan, and her late father, Sy, after years working in fine jewelry manufacturing and running her own accessories showroom. She launched with a single pavé-diamond horseshoe necklace and diamond-set charm bracelets, a hard sell to retailers at first until Serena Williams wore a Sydney Evan moon pendant in InStyle and Neiman Marcus picked up the line in 2006.
Chan Luu Jewelry
Chan Luu started her namesake line in 1996 out of a Los Angeles garage, after two decades working retail floors and buying desks around the fashion industry. The label built its name on handmade jewelry produced with artisans in Vietnam and India, the kind of wrap bracelets and beaded pieces that made her a fixture on 2000s red carpets long before hers was a household name.
Ten Thousand Things Jewelry: 18K Gold Pieces From a New York Duo
Ron Anderson and David Rees, both self-taught jewelers who came out of fashion retail rather than formal design school, founded Ten Thousand Things in New York in 1991, taking their name from a line in the Tao Te Ching. The label helped bring personal, wearable fine jewelry back into fashion at a moment when magazines were dominated by oversized costume pieces, a shift cemented early when Kate Moss wore its small cross pearl earrings in her first Calvin Klein campaign in 1992. Here are some of my personal favorite items from the collection...
Golden Goose Shoes
Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo started Golden Goose in a garage in Marghera, near Venice, in 2000, when they were both in their early twenties. The brand's entire identity rests on a single idea introduced in 2007, the Super-Star sneaker, hand-distressed until it looks like it has already lived a life before you bought it.
Ben-Amun
Isaac Manevitz, an Egyptian-born designer who had worked for costume houses like Trifari, started Ben-Amun in New York in 1980, naming it for his eldest son and the pharaoh Tutankhamun. The brand never pretended to be fine jewelry: it built its name on hand-finished pieces in electroplated gold, Czech glass and Majorca pearls, made to photograph and move like the real thing, which is exactly what got a Ben-Amun cuff onto Jackie Kennedy Onassis's wrist in 1989.
Moritz Glik Jewelry
Moritz Glik founded his eponymous jewelry line in New York in 2003, after leaving a shoe company he ran in his native Belo Horizonte, Brazil and teaching himself jewelry-making once he arrived in the city in 1991. His signature invention, the Kaleidoscope Shaker, encases loose, uncut gemstones inside capsules of white sapphire crystal and gold so the stones move freely
Black Suede Studio Shoes: Montreal Loafers, Boots and Mules
Kris Avakian launched Black Suede Studio out of Montreal in 2018, after years spent inside his family's accessories manufacturing business, including a stint running quality control at their factory in Qingdao, China. The label's whole premise was closing a gap he saw in footwear: shoes with real quality and comfort at a level nobody else was hitting, a conviction strong enough that he later moved production to Brazil to get the craftsmanship right.
Loewe
A guide to Loewe, from an 1846 Madrid leather workshop to the Amazona, the Puzzle and the house's new chapter under McCollough and Hernandez. Bags, shoes, ready-to-wear, Anagram eyewear, jewelry and candles, grouped by type, with notes on what to buy first.