Tell off the jerks around you with a cheeky little tool from Good Worth & Co.
Putting the proper patina into the age-old ritual of flipping the bird, the Best Wishes Key is a solid brass key for doing just that. The clever, ironically named little trinket comes from the creative minds at Good Worth & Co. More than just a keepsake to clutter your…
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Jules Kim’s new shop defines NYC’s underground arts scene
To anyone with a finance degree, opening a jewelry store below street level would seem like a risky move. But to Jules Kim, the sole designer behind Bijules, this location is not only on brand, but its clandestine location is also part of a forward-thinking business move the food and beverage industry has capitalized on for years—anyone who’s used the phone booth at Crif Dogs or made their way through the kitchen at La Esquina knows that often what’s most attractive in NYC isn’t always visible at surface level.
Kim’s new appointment-only showroom and shop on the Bowery—situated below the equally progressive boutique Eva New York—is a dark, den-like room that seduces you with its mystery. “I come from the underground,” Kim tells us. “I started promoting Bijules in the clubs here in New York. It makes sense to launch in the belly of the Bowery to maintain the real integrity of the brand. Bijules is a research-driven brand and my clients take pride in the discovery of their jewels. The fact that the Bijulesterie breathes below ground indicates its durability in this grimy city but also its communication potential will flourish from down under to way above!”
Kim’s raw talent for innovative design has Bijules on the hands of everyone from Rihanna to Rooney Mara in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, but it’s her everlasting indie spirit that keeps the line perpetually fresh and admired by her peers. The Bijulesterie is as much an extension of her downtown lifestyle and an homage to artist friends as it is a functioning showroom.
“I wanted to create a 360-degree experience around the showroom, one which starts in the simple awareness of its existence, the descension into the room, the fragrance developed by Six Scents, contemporary psychedelic artwork by Sylvia Hommert, flower design by 11×11, streaming tunes while we work and of course a 125-gallon vintage aquarium—aka the Bijules jewelry display,” she explains.
In addition to hosting rooftop parties at The Standard this summer, the bold beauty is currently taking appointments before taking Bijules on an international tour this summer. To contact Kim for an appointment, see her website.
All images by Elizabeth Raab.
Laura Wass strikes out on her own with jewelry combining the industrial with the handmade
Balancing a spare, industrial aesthetic with the richness of fine jewelry, designer Laura Wass has opened up an interesting niche for herself in the market. With Fall 2012 she has launched WXYZ, a focused line of “DNA” and jacks bead necklaces, rubber and steel pulley bracelets, rubber bubble bangles and geometric metal-and-resin rings. With each detail, from the softness of the neoprene bracelet links, to the satisfying weight of a beaded helix and the almost hidden precious pearls floating in resin, Wass balances the focused precision of large-scale metalwork with handmade thought and, equally as importantly, injects a playful attitude in every serious piece.
We caught up with Wass at her studio and workspace at the 3rd Ward, where she makes it all happen, from hand-sketching and CAD—and some desktop acrobatics to keep the creative juices flowing—to steel lathing and metal finishing. With her first collection freshly launched, she filled us in on process and inspiration, while offering us a sneak peek at the Spring 2013 collection.
It was like jumping off a diving board. In some ways when I started I was anxious to start my own projects and then at the same time I felt as though I would never be quite ready. I always felt there was something more I could learn, or some way I could grow before starting my own thing, but then at some point those two paths crossed—the desire to create and the feeling that I had a really strong foundation in the industry and in manufacturing and design practice and those things came together and it was just time. And I also had the support—my boss at the last company I worked for is a great mentor, and has taught me so much about new manufacturing methods and engineering and so he was really fundamental in my growth as a designer and in helping me articulate what I wanted to do.
It started with a fascination with the history of design and the Bauhaus movement, and it evolved as I entered the industry, and started becoming more experienced and interested in the process of how things are made. Which was always my focus—my initial entrance came from making things by hand, but then, when I started to explore the machine I saw how much more it was capable of doing, and then that drew me back again to the traditions of Bauhaus. By incorporating both the handmade and the industrially made, we get such a wide range of design capabilities, so for me it became this hunger for knowledge so that I could expand and inform my design practice.
It definitely evolves, there are a lot of surprises. I’ll usually start with one goal or one idea and then come out with something entirely different through the process of sketching, of physically making with your hands. I think for me when I’m making something with my hands my brain is activated and starts really running through new ideas, so things tend to evolve a lot from the initial concept however there are some instances where something will just snap into my head and there it is and that’s the way it started.
For me because the industrial and handmade production are both so important I’m really exploring as many different production methods as possible. So in order to do that I have to find as many different resources where they specialize in these different techniques. So, from die striking, brass stamping and zinc die casting to screw machining, C&Cing and lasering to water jet cutting (which is much stronger than laser cutting, surprisingly) and, let’s see what else—powder coating, plating, die cutting, ball chains, automated chain-making and lathing, which is similar to a screw machine.
The jacks beads are inspired by a childhood bead I played with growing up. I took the concept of that bead and engineered it in CAD—it went through about 10 different revisions, actually—I tweaked the shape and the form so that they sit together. They’re different, though. The original beads have round fronts, and I wanted to create a pyramid structure, something architectural. It’s both organic—a fundamental structure of life, almost like a chemical composition—but it’s also manmade, architectural and geometric. I wanted them to fit together with space for you to see the articulation of the shape, but also create a new form with these individual pieces.
That’s actually really important for the line—the use of individual components that together create an entirely new form. The DNA necklace is another example of that: individually they’re these beads and rods, but together they creates this whole new structure, much like the way life is made.
The jacks beads are created in a blue model as a rapid prototype, and then they’re basically engraved into a steel die. So you take a piece of steel, and there are several different processes that you go through to create a negative form with this extremely hardened steel, and then the molten metal is injected into the steel die. It’s a way of casting that’s not commonly used for jewelry because it’s a very high production run—to get the machine up and running you need to have about 2,000 pieces. So, the molten metal is injected into the die, and because it’s a steel form it’s filling, it’s extremely precise, and can be replicated over and over and over, whereas as with lost-wax casting there are a lot of irregularities. So it’s perfect for this industrial, super-defined form.
It definitely starts with the technical, industrial and biology/chemistry part of it. For instance, right now for next season I’m really inspired by these overlapping architectural movements—so, Moorish and Arabic geometry and architecture, and how that intersects with the other histories of religious architecture, whether it be Jewish or Christian. I was just in Israel so I saw this amazing confluence of Jewish and Arabic and Christian design, and the histories of those places, what that means to so many people and how it looks—kind of like this tapestry of cultural influence. I’m looking at design motifs and architecture, and, of course, I’m looking at nature as always. Also, I’ve been thinking about mazes, and humans creating abstractions in the landscape through the use of geometry, so looking at where city and nature meet in design. Fashion, in many ways, is just the world that I live in so it kind of seeps in through the cracks of what I’m thinking. It’s not necessarily the focus, but it’s always there.
Images by Greg Stefano
Roughshod elegance marks a designer’s handmade jewelry
In Albert Zuger‘s jewelry you can see Aphrodite taking Hephaestus’ hand; it is a heavenly marriage of beauty and the forge. The Toronto-based designer hammers out earrings, necklaces, rings and bracelets in bronze that carry an unpretentious elegance, marks of the hammer, and the spirit of the American craftsmanship.
Zuger’s involvement with jewelry began with an actual wedding—his own. As a metalworker since high school and a sculptor by trade, when he proposed to his wife, Sasha Suda, he didn’t feel it was right for them to wear rings he hadn’t made himself. What he produced, and what now rests on both of their fingers, features hundreds of layers of several steel alloys, with a lining of gold peeking out around the edge. Those who saw the ring went mad for it, and Zuger—who was leaving his metal fabrication outfit in New York for Suda’s hometown of Toronto—saw an opportunity to start a new career that combined his love of sculpture, jewelry and traditional metalwork.
“I’ve been a metalworker since age 15,” says Zuger, who moved to Kansas City as a teenager and volunteered with historic blacksmith shop there. Meanwhile, he took every jewelry design class his high school offered and learned to weld in a metal fabrication studio before driving his 1950 Ford pickup to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied sculpture. After college, he opened his own metal fabrication business in an 1850s warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fabricating elements of artists’ large-scale sculptures, ornate arch metalwork, and unique structures like a pair of giant bronze doors for an Upper East Side mansion.
Zuger works all of this experience into his jewelry design, citing Samuel Maloof, and the revival of the American Arts and Crafts movement in the 1950s as his inspiration. “I see myself more than anything else as a sculptor,” he says. “I wouldn’t call myself a jeweler.” Whether sculptural pieces or jewelry, the resulting golden bangles, rings and collar necklaces befit strong women from Gramercy to “Game of Thrones” (there are also shoehorns, keychains, and cufflinks for all). Their details and refinement speak to a marked sophistication, but their hand-hammered shape and construction speak to a deep connection to the process in which they were crafted.
“I’m inspired by Calder, Noguchi, Hans Hofman. It’s a cultural exploration of form and surface in a wearable sort of way,” says Zuger.
For Zuger, the key is in the craftsmanship. “Every surface has been changed from what it started out as. It’s a transformative process that creates these objects that are both and very sculptural,” he says. “The most important thing to me is to have my hands in the stuff, to be actually making it. Having studied sculpture and making things all these years, that’s what I enjoy most. It’s all hand-hammered. I don’t have other people cast stuff. I don’t have other people do my stamping.”
With no disrespect to David Yurman or Chanel (fine, some disrespect), or even the smaller, trendy jewelry-makers—the Pamela Loves, the Philip Crangis—I believe this is what is called a labor of love.
Chen Chen and Kai Williams’ Brazilian debut unveils a collection of melded jewelry and furniture
Like the results of mineralization—when organic sources meet and meld with other substances that then embody the form of the original—artists Chen Chen and Kai Williams‘ cross-sectioned pieces interpret what happens when the mountains of forgotten excess and scrap material linger so long that they become fused. These pieces—along with a few others especially created for their Brazilian debut—just opened at São Paulo’s Coletivo Amor de Madre in an exhibition dubbed “Factory”.
Brought to the metropolis by a partnership between the design store and BoomSPDesign (which hosts the annual BoomSP Design Festival), Chen and Williams had only three days to produce all the works in the show, which includes two stools, several necklaces and a table with matching seats. The melded pieces also function as drink coasters for those who don’t feel queasy when looking at something that resembles a slice of ham hock or the inside of a cell.
The table’s shiny surface is thick with resin and embedded with plastic sheeting. A spot pattern also decorates the surface—the result of contact between resin and the paint that was sprayed onto the tabletop. However, with little time and no access to the typical material that the duo was used to back at their home base in New York, they had to get a bit inventive, which for them, isn’t difficult.
“We have an overarching theme of experimentation with materials. Everything we make starts from playing around with materials and allowing those experiments to speak to us,” they explain. “The idea of making our wrapped, resin-soaked fabric compositions wasn’t possible because we couldn’t get the same kinds of resin in São Paulo. We used a plastic tarp as a mold. The tarps were also something we noticed in Brazilian hardware stores. In the US, they don’t sell it like fabric, on rolls that you can buy by the meter.”
As a design studio, they’re relatively fresh to the scene. The pair, who met while at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, officially cemented their studio partnership last year, though they both brought experience to the union. Chen, for instance, worked as Moss Bureau‘s display director in 2010, and Williams had his own manufacturing company, working with designers and artists to produce their pieces.
“Factory” is on view through 12 May 2012.
Coletivo Amor de Madre
Rua Estados Unidos, 2186
Jardins, São Paulo
11 3061.9384
An Icelandic duo’s first accessories collection references the nation’s most prolific saga with Viking Age materials
Staka marks the first collection in an ongoing series between Icelandic product designers María Kristín Jónsdóttir and Bylgja Svansdóttir, comprising a curious mix of finely crafted unisex leather neck accessories. The aristocratic vibe of each piece stems from the design duo’s concept for the range, which draws inspiration from one of Iceland’s most notorious narratives, the Brennu-Njáls saga. Like all Icelandic sagas, the author remains anonymous, but the extensive storyline is centered around a familial feud which brings the idea of masculinity into question. The designers were also particularly taken by the tale’s leading lady, Hallgerður Langbrók, a femme fatale “who was notorious for her majestic appearance and temperament”, explains Svansdóttir.
Cut and molded from “Viking Age materials”, each piece is designed to tell a story about the wearer’s social status, but the beauty lies in their ambiguity. “We want each person to have the freedom to decide their own story and social status,” explains Svansdóttir. “The responses we’ve gotten so far have been very interesting, people guessing which pieces famous characters from The Icelandic Sagas would have worn, etc.”
Each equipped with their own portfolio of distinct works, the pair met while both exhibiting at Reykjavik’s Spark Design Space. Having bonded over a shared passion for unconventional jewelry and accessories design, they will continue to evolve the Staka line together, adding to the exciting range of unusual statement pieces.
Staka 2012 is available in limited supply at 38 þrep in Reykjavik, which stocks an equally exciting inventory of fashion and design goods.
Industrial, urban and biological influences for a versatile design studio
Striking a balance between simplicity and intricacy, husband and wife design duo John and Svetlana (Lana) Briscella seamlessly merge their talents in Aminimal, a multifaceted studio that pushes the dimensions of industrial design. Aptly named, Aminimal aims to artfully spin the belief that minimal design comes from constrained concepts. “Aminimal has the word minimal inside but reads atypical, like something different,” Lana explains. Aminimal’s name is also often misconstrued as the word “animal”, a slip that the duo creatively embraces and occasionally integrates into their designs.
After meeting in Vienna, John and Lana set up shop in New York in 2011. Based in Brooklyn, the duo’s designs have an abstract, urbanist appeal. Culling from their travels and dwellings in various cities as well as from John’s academic background in Urban Strategies, Aminimal draws from the grid-like patterns of metropolitan spaces to create customized map mementos. Turning a memorable meeting place into commemorative and, in the case of the NYC Cork Board, functional art pieces, Aminimal celebrates “an emotional connection to the city.”
The couple spent time in Paris before landing in the States, and paying homage to their former haunt, Aminimal tested the limitations of dimensionality by re-interpreting the Louis XIV Ghost Armchair by designer Philippe Starck as a 3D cutout shroud of a map of Paris. Matching conceptual forwardness with technical precision, Aminimal uses a variety of tools. However, they cite their best tool as the “connection between our heart, brain and eyes.”
Initially exploring the energy of intersecting points through lamp designs—namely the polygonal-shaped Contact Window Lighting System—Aminimal added anatomy to the equation with its jewelry line, the Field Test Collection, which is “designed around the premise of structures found in magnetic fields.” The couple also created the Second Skin Watch, which swaps numbers for LED lights. The timepiece answers the age-old design challenge to “make a watch that’s not a watch”, presenting a futuristic study of the human hand’s natural contours, modeled after the flow of pouring water.
Aminimal’s innovative Calibration Stool and its Lounge counterpart, respectively evocative of a porcupine and spiny caterpillar, are made up of multiple wooden legs to create what they call a “3D rocking chair”. Bucking the notion that people remain creatures of habit, the Calibration Stool enables a person to move into a variety of seated positions by pivoting their weight against the numerous leg options.
Inspired by nature, Aminimal also turns to geometric formations. “In industrial design, you look for a line,” says John. “You’re looking to re-purpose analogies in your design. What I was looking for was, ‘What is the negative and positive of points and what is the reaction that causes the relationship?'”
Brook&Lyn’s light-reflecting amulets inspired by superstitious customs
As a follow-up to her popular debut lineup of agate pendant necklaces and body wraps, the stark leather and mirror pieces that comprise Mimi Jung‘s quietly powerful “Deflected” collection reveal an artistic progression that’s both varied and cohesive.
Inspired by a friend’s great-grandmother who regularly hid a mirror under her blouse to ward off evil spirits, Jung wanted to create a collection based on the idea of controlling one’s own well-being through the power of deflection. Amulet necklaces constructed from folded pieces of thick saddle leather, patina-covered mirrors that hang from a twisted cotton cord over one’s breastplate and molded-leather rings call to mind a mini hand-shield fit for a superheroine.
Brooklyn-based Jung took the concept of self-protection one step further, telling us that she selected a circle as the central shape running through her collection because it has been a symbol of defense throughout history in various cultures. The beautifully clouded, aged mirrors come from Brooklyn as well. The artist responsible for hand-antiquing them is extremely protective of his methods, Jung explains, recalling an instance in which he nearly banned her from his studio for trying to take his picture.
Pieces range from $66-$363 and are available online at Brook&Lyn.
See the collection in this haunting video lookbook.
European luxury and traditional Chinese craftsmanship in a Shanghai boutique
by Alessandro De Toni
In a bustling metropolis like Shanghai, Shang Xia‘s boutique strikes a balance between “human and nature”, a millenary value of Chinese culture that often appears to be lost in the country’s economic rush. Wood and sandstone are combined together with high-tech fiber to create a corner of peace, a unique and harmonious environment.
The Shang Xia brand was founded in 2008 by Chinese designer Jian Qiong Er and Hermès, one of the most well-known western luxury brands in China. Together, they collaborate on a line of furniture, decorative objects, jewelry and high-fashion garments entirely produced in China and characterized by excellent craftsmanship and understated simplicity.
As the name Shang Xia implies—it translates to “up and down” in English—style is a state of harmony achieved by a dynamic flow of energy from the past, present and future. It’s a dialogue between tradition and contemporary taste, which aims to create a 21st-century lifestyle founded on the finest of Chinese design traditions.
Among Shang Xia’s most beautiful crafts are the jewelry collections “Garden” and “Shan Shui”. In the former, the Taihu rock—an ancient symbol of wisdom and immortality—is combined with red sandalwood, jade, agate, gold and silver through a carving process that can take up to 300 hours.
For “Shan Shui”, agate and jade are carved and polished in the shape of an ancient Chinese coin. The process requires abut 480 hours of craftsmanship by a single artisan who cuts and polishes the agate on a spinning wheel. It is an almost spiritual exercise that recalls samsara, the Sanskrit word for the ever-turning wheel of life.
Shang Xia
1F, South Tower, Hong Kong Plaza
283 Huaihai Middle Rd, Shanghai
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