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.
EF Collection Jewelry
Emily Faith Strauss started EF Collection in Los Angeles in 2010, initially curating other designers' jewelry for trunk shows before she began designing her own pieces by 2013. The line took its name from her own initials and built a following on 14 karat gold and diamonds in stacking, huggie and charm formats that read as fine jewelry without the stiffness.
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.
Melissa Kaye Jewelry
Melissa Kaye spent a decade as a quantitative strategist at Goldman Sachs, with an engineering degree from MIT and a computational finance master's from Carnegie Mellon, before enrolling in the two-year jewelry design program at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology and launching her eponymous fine jewelry line in 2013. Her training shows less in ornament than in structure, diamond-set pieces built on clean, architectural lines that only loosened up once she began introducing color through enamel later in the decade.
NeverNoT Jewelry
NeverNoT was founded in 2018 in London by Georgian-born friends Nina Dzhokhadze, who had worked in sales and business development at Burberry and Stephen Webster, and Natia Chkhartishvili, a stylist who had previously run her own accessories brand. The specific thing that makes the label recognizable is its mix of large, precious stones with bold enamel and neon color, built to make fine jewelry feel like an everyday object rather than a special occasion one.
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.
Sheryl Lowe Jewelry
Sheryl Lowe started making jewelry as a teenager in 1970s Southern California, then spent decades working as a Hollywood makeup artist on more than thirty films before turning her hobby into a real business after a 2006 favor for California First Lady Maria Shriver. She made fifty five beaded, pave diamond necklaces for a women's conference gift bag, the orders that followed pushed her out of her dining room and into an actual studio, and she still hand-selects gemstones and beads collected on her own travels.
Joie DiGiovanni Jewelry
Joie DiGiovanni, a Philadelphia native, started designing jewelry in the early 2010s while recovering from a serious car accident that left her with several autoimmune conditions. Her signature is baroque South Sea and Tahitian pearls set against leather and diamonds, a pairing she traces back to how a pearl itself forms, as an irritant transformed into something beautiful.
Bea Bongiasca Jewelry
Bea Bongiasca launched her eponymous jewelry line in Milan in 2013, straight out of Central Saint Martins, debuting her first collection at 10 Corso Como the following year. The label is built on candy colored enamel wrapped around gemstones, a playful, sculptural language that treats fine jewelry like it should not take itself too seriously.
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.
VRAI Jewelry
Vanessa Stofenmacher and Chelsea Nicholson founded the label in Los Angeles in 2014 as Vrai & Oro, selling made-to-order recycled-gold jewelry before the diamond producer Diamond Foundry acquired the business and shortened the name to VRAI in 2019. Every stone the house sets now comes from its own zero-emission foundry in Wenatchee, Washington, which produced what the company describes as the world's first carbon-neutral certified lab-grown diamond in 2017.
Rene Barnes Jewelry
Rene Barnes launched her eponymous fine jewelry line in May 2022, working out of Charleston, South Carolina, with pieces cast in New York City. Every design starts with Barnes hand-sculpting wax herself before it goes through lost-wax casting, so the resulting pieces keep a slightly irregular, hand-carved quality rather than a machine-perfect finish.
Janessa Leone Bags
Janessa Leone bought a vintage men's dress hat in Paris, later found the original milliner's surname stitched inside was also Leone, and turned that discovery into her own Los Angeles hat line in 2013. Notes on which hat shapes hold up to daily wear and where the bags and belts fit into that idea.
Judith Leiber Couture Bags
Judith Leiber, a Budapest-trained handbag maker who survived the Nazi occupation and emigrated to New York in 1947, started her own company there in 1963 after twelve years working for designer Nettie Rosenstein. A shipment of poorly plated brass frames pushed her to cover the flaws in crystals, and that fix became the house's signature minaudière, the small, sculptural evening bag later carried by numerous First Ladies.
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.
Quiet Luxury: Khaite Tops, Skirts and Pumps
Quiet luxury means clean lines and quality fabrics that do not announce themselves. I gathered Khaite tops, skirts and pumps in that spirit.
Savette Bags
Amy Zurek founded Savette in New York in 2020, after studying art history and fashion design at Parsons, then working at The Row and building Khaite's handbag line from scratch alongside founder Cate Holstein. She named the label after her mother's maiden name and built its design language around two women, her mother's classic taste in leather goods and her grandmother's eye for sculptural jewelry.
CANO Jewelry
CANO began as a family obsession, not a fashion label: in Bogotá, Guillermo Cano trained as a goldsmith in Germany before opening a boutique in 1968 to recreate the pre-Columbian gold pieces his grandfather Nemesio had unearthed decades earlier. Its defining fact is a license, not a trend: CANO is the only jewelry house authorized by the Banco de la República's Gold Museum to reproduce pieces from its collection, using the same lost-wax casting the original goldsmiths used.
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.
Jenna Blake Jewelry
Jenna Grosfeld launched her namesake fine jewelry label, Jenna Blake, in Los Angeles after building a personal collection of antique pieces for two decades. The work is handcrafted in LA and takes its cues from Art Deco and mid-century jewelers, including Boucheron and René Boivin, reworked in color and scale for a stack-it-all-on approach rather than a single statement piece.
Pomellato Jewelry: Color, Scale and Milanese Swagger
Pomellato treats fine jewelry like a wardrobe, with color, scale, and a little Milanese swagger built into every piece. Founded in Milan by Pino Rabolini in 1967, the house introduced the idea of prêt-à-porter jewelry and made colored stones feel modern rather than ceremonial. The Nudo and Iconica families still carry that direct, tactile point of view.
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.
Polished Pieces That Look Designer (But Aren't)
Polished blazers, faux leather trousers, loafers and soft knits that look like designer pieces. This is for anyone who wants a sharp, pulled together wardrobe without the designer label.
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.