Jewelry
Jewelry
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.
Sorellina Jewelry
Sisters Nicole and Kim Carosella, both New York natives, launched Sorellina in the early 2010s, starting with pieces made by melting down and resetting stones from their mother's old jewelry. Nicole trained in jewelry fabrication at FIT while Kim handled the business side, and the label's name, Italian for younger sister, nods to their own family shorthand as much as their heritage.
Pamela Zamore Jewelry
Pamela Zamore spent seventeen years running her own interior design firm in Boston before shifting into jewelry around 2014, first working in silver before moving the collection to 18 karat gold around 2023. Her designs pull from a lifelong collection of 1970s gold jewelry, antiques and decorative arts, translated into pieces with heavy texture and dimension rather than smooth, polished surfaces.
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.
Jade Ruzzo Jewelry
Jade Ruzzo launched her eponymous fine jewelry line in New York in 2022, after a decade working at Conde Nast titles and as a personal stylist. The specific thing that drives the collection is family: pieces are named for and inspired by her late father Vic, a drummer, and her daughter Gloria, born in 2019, with the Percussion collection built directly around his cymbals and drum motifs.
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.
Nak Armstrong Jewelry
Nak Armstrong trained as an architect at the University of Texas before a detour into New York fashion led him back to Austin, where a textile company he ran with a partner pivoted into jewelry by the late 1990s under the name Anthony Nak. After that partnership ended around 2009, Armstrong spent two years developing a new direction and launched his eponymous label in 2011, quickly picked up by Barneys New York and Bergdorf Goodman.
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.
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.
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.
ILA Dresses and Jewelry
ILA was founded in Houston in 2007 by Vikas Sodhani, an MIT engineering graduate who left the dot-com industry, apprenticed at a diamond-cutting facility in Mumbai, and taught himself to design jewelry from there. The label is named for his sister Ila Sodhani, who joined as design collaborator, and it still makes every piece by hand in that same Houston studio, drawing on a family already steeped in the diamond trade.
Graziela Jewelry
Graziela Kaufman grew up in Brazil around the country's gemstone-mining regions before founding her eponymous fine jewelry line, building direct relationships with miners she still works with today. What distinguishes the brand is that sourcing comes first, with two gemstone variants she identified even trademarked as Midnight Aquamarine and Graziela Tourmaline.
DRU. Jewelry
Thea Miller left a twenty-year teaching career in 2016 to launch her Los Angeles jewelry label, DRU., full time. She builds every piece around symbols and short, pointed mantras meant to read as armor rather than decoration, and makes it all in Downtown Los Angeles.
Stephanie Windsor Jewelry
Stephanie Windsor, born Stephanie Levy in Montreal, moved to Manhattan in 1987 and got her start working for Norma Kamali at the height of Kamali's 1980s run before later co-chairing design marketing at Parsons. She went on to run her own accessories showroom and was tapped to exclusively curate Barneys New York's antique and vintage fine jewelry and pre-owned watches, a role that shaped the eye behind her own label spanning Georgian through Art Deco periods.
Sauer Jewelry
Jules Sauer, a French teenager who fled Europe in 1939, arrived in Brazil and opened his own gem-cutting business, Lapidação Amsterdam, in Rio de Janeiro in 1941, later becoming known as a gemstone hunter for his role in certifying Brazilian emeralds internationally. He opened the brand's first standalone store on Avenida Atlântica beside the Copacabana Palace in 1956, and the house's Constellation ring won a Diamond International Award in 1966 and is still produced today.
Elior Jewelry
Elior Mordechai started learning the jewelry trade at fourteen, interning summers at his family's wholesale diamond business before training in metalsmithing at the Fashion Institute of Technology and in design at the New York Jewelry Design Institute. His pieces lean maximalist and pattern-heavy, a sensibility he traces to his Persian heritage and a grandfather who dealt in Middle Eastern antiques.
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.