![]() ![]() Many jewelers - including prestige brands such as Hemmerle in Munich, Taffin in New York City and JAR in Paris - defy easy categorization, but increasingly, the designer jewelry landscape is falling into maximalist and minimalist camps. ![]() “And the flip side is: ‘There’s a lot of suffering around me and I want to be low-key in my aesthetic.’ Those are very valid responses to the exact same question.” “The maximalists are reaching for the sunny day: ‘I need an antidote to the darkness in the world,’” said Marion Fasel, a jewelry historian, author and founder and editorial director of the online jewelry publication The Adventurine. At the other end of the spectrum are shoppers discouraged by the war in Ukraine, sustainability concerns and inflation, and they are having an equal but opposite sartorial reaction. It is not just the waning pandemic that has sent some consumers, eager to dress up and hit the town, searching for dramatic silhouettes (i.e., the return of the shoulder-duster earring) and glam looks that emphasize personal style and fantasy. Brunini’s work has long been a source of creative tension among designers - contrast the sumptuous, color-intense creations of the 20th century jewelers Fulco di Verdura and David Webb with the spare, monochromatic designs of Georg Jensen and Elsa Peretti - but lately, the tension has taken on new resonance. “During Covid, I went to a place of, when everything is stripped to its base elements, where do the wildflowers grow?” “The necklace is quite minimal but because the color is so strong, it becomes maximal - it’s like a fireburst,” she said. Brunini juxtaposed the amber with fan-like strips of upcycled copper verdigris in a necklace that became the heart of her new Brutalism collection, an ode to the less-is-more aesthetic of the iconic buildings of her youth in San Diego - like the Salk Institute, Louis Kahn’s 1965 architectural masterpiece, in nearby La Jolla. “They felt like building blocks, and that led me to think about Brutalist structures.” “I had a suite of 100-million-year-old Burmese faceted amber pieces that had been sitting in my safe for years,” she said on a recent phone call. ![]() At the height of the lockdowns in 2020, Katey Brunini, a jewelry designer in Southern California, did what many jewelers stuck at home did during those early months of the pandemic: She rifled through her safe in search of materials for her next collection. ![]()
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