Jewelry
Jewelry
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.
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.
Frédérique Dessemond: The Founder Behind Ginette NY Jewelry
Frédérique Dessemond, a Marseille-born, Sorbonne-trained art history graduate, started Ginette NY in New York in 2002 after years of customizing vintage furniture and clothing rather than making jewelry from scratch. Her breakthrough was the Disc, a plain polished gold circle threaded on a fine chain and engraved with initials, which turned fine jewelry into something meant for daily wear rather than special occasions.
Keane Jewelry
Keane is the Brooklyn label started in 2017 by Colin Keane Lynch, who trained in glassblowing in Venice as a teenager and later at Rhode Island School of Design before a stint working retail in fashion, where he began experimenting with glass on the side around 2012. The brand still makes its jewelry and objects the same way, hand-blown glass paired with precious metals, in a studio near the Manhattan Bridge, with collections that have referenced everything from his father's home county of Kerry in Ireland to the psychedelic revolution and Japanese wagashi sweets.
Pascale Monvoisin Jewelry
Pascale Monvoisin spent around fifteen years as a flight attendant for Air France before a batch of turquoise bought on a stopover in Jaipur turned into her first ring and, by 2009, her own Paris jewelry house. Every piece is still designed in her Paris studio and produced by artisans in that same Jaipur workshop, now grown from one craftsman into a full production unit.
Ivi Kyratzi's IVI: Jewelry Made With Italian Factory Craft
Ivi Kyratzi, a Cypriot designer who trained at Parsons in New York, launched her namesake jewelry label IVI in Los Angeles in 2016 after meeting Italian manufacturer Gabriele Veneri, whose family has worked metal in Arezzo, Tuscany for generations. Every piece is still produced in Veneri's Arezzo factory, and the brand's first release, the Slot collection, remains its best-selling range nearly a decade later.
Sylva & Cie
Sylva Yepremian, who was born in Lebanon, raised in Paris and trained at the jeweler's bench by her father, a master craftsman who had worked for Cartier, co-founded Sylva & Cie with her husband Raffi in Los Angeles in 2007. Their families had run jewelry businesses in the same downtown LA building for decades, and the label built its identity on hand-crafted, antique-inspired pieces drawing on Georgian and Victorian design.
Stephen Russell Jewelry: Antique and Vintage 18K Gold Pieces
Russell Zelenetz, who had been headed for dental school before taking jewelry classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology, teamed up with Stephen Feuerman, who had worked the jewelry trade in London, to open Stephen Russell on Madison Avenue in New York in 1984. The shop built its name on carefully vetted vintage and antique jewelry spanning the Victorian, Edwardian, Art Deco and retro periods, alongside original contemporary designs made in the same spirit.
Sig Ward Jewelry
Sig Ward spent over a decade working as an acupuncturist in Southern California before she started making beaded jewelry with the healing stones she used in her practice, a hobby that eventually became a full line called Rocks and Gems. She relaunched under her own name, Sig Ward Jewelry, around 2014, designing primarily in 14k and 18k gold and drawing on her mother's vintage jewelry collection and her childhood on the beaches of Tel Aviv.
Vertigo Jewelry
Taylor Sade started Vertigo in 2021 after buying out a closing lapidary's stock of oversized stones on a trip home to Phoenix, Arizona, then teaching herself to string beads despite having studied communication design at Parsons rather than jewelry making. She built the brand between Phoenix and New York, chunky amulets, medallions and hip belts in stones like turquoise, malachite and lapis lazuli, and a 2023 New York Times profile naming her pieces the necklace of the moment prompted her to quit her day job and run the label full time.
Gazza Ladra Jewelry: Gold Necklaces and Earrings Built in New York
Gazza Ladra jewelry was built in New York by Sunny Setton De Poortere, a former documentary film producer and tour manager. I picked the gold necklaces and earrings, from lizard earrings to a single shell earring.
State Property Jewelry
State Property is the Singaporean fine jewelry label started in 2015 by married couple Afzal Imram, trained in industrial design at the National University of Singapore, and Lin Ruiyin, trained in contemporary jewelry design at Central Saint Martins in London. They funded their first collection through commission work before launching properly, won Emerging Accessories Designer of the Year at the Singapore Fashion Awards in 2017, and landed their first major celebrity placement in 2018 when Nicole Kidman wore their earrings to a film premiere.
Mateo Jewelry
Matthew Harris, who goes by Mateo, started making jewelry for himself in Brooklyn in 2009, the story goes that a screw fell out of a wall while he was moving apartments and he turned it into a necklace. He is self-taught, and the label he eventually built stayed men's-only until 2014, when he launched a women's fine jewelry line after Rihanna was photographed wearing one of his pieces.
Keagan Ramsamy and Louise de Rothschild: Founders of Mazarin
Louise de Rothschild and Keagan Ramsamy, who met working in the jewelry department of the Paris auction house Pierre Bergé, founded Mazarin in 2022. They named the house after Cardinal Mazarin, the 17th-century minister whose collection of exceptional diamonds became legendary, and built their own version of that history on lab-grown diamonds and recycled gold rather than antique stock.
Jacquie Aiche Jewelry: 14K Gold Necklaces and Rings From LA
Jacquie Aiche grew up in Los Angeles making bead necklaces before she ever meant to start a company, and she launched her namesake jewelry line there in 2007 after years of selling pieces anonymously off her own body while running a clothing boutique on Sunset Plaza. The brand's break came from the finger bracelet she designed around 2009, an idea odd enough that it turned into a genuine signature worn by Beyoncé, Rihanna and the Hadid sisters, among others.
Nada Ghazal Jewelry
Nada Ghazal spent a decade in Dubai advertising, rising to senior art director at Impact BBDO, before returning to Beirut in 2003 to design jewelry instead. Her first collection, twenty five handmade pieces in eighteen karat gold wire called Organised Chaos, reportedly sold out within days of its December 2003 debut, and she opened her first Beirut boutique and atelier the following year.
Rachel Quinn Jewelry: From Painting and Sculpture to Gold
Rachel Quinn jewelry here is made in 14K yellow gold, with amazonite, sapphire and coral in pendants and earrings.
Bleecker and Prince: Leehe Segal's 14K Gold Jewelry
Leehe Segal launched Bleecker and Prince in New York in the early 2010s, naming it for two SoHo streets that run close but never meet. I went through its 14K gold hoops, pendants and bangles.
Fernando Jorge Jewelry
Fernando Jorge trained as a jewelry designer in São Paulo before moving to London in 2008 for a master's at Central Saint Martins, launching his own label out of that degree in 2010. His signature is sculptural, high-polish gold built around movement rather than stacked stones, made by artisans working across Brazil and Italy.