“I WANT TO MAKE PEOPLE RE-EVALUATE OUR BELIEFS OF THE VALUE OF JEWELLERY.”
What have you been doing this year?
Looking for a job… It takes pretty long, to be honest. I was assisting Felicia Swartling for a couple of months in her studio, before her exhibition in Stockholm. I have just finished working for McQueen, actually, helping out with the run-up to Paris. I worked within the jewellery team, drawing high-quality digital files of the entire SS16 collection. I provided interdepartmental assistance, which involved communication with major clients, both in London and Florence. Additionally, I assisted the designers in Paris during and after the show, as well as in the showroom there. It was pretty intense. I guess the exciting thing right now is that I’m working on starting my own thing, with a fellow classmate.
I know it’s fresh, but looking back at your BA at Central Saint Martins, is there anything you learnt after graduating that you would have rather known before?
One thing I learnt is that you have to be true to yourself. There is so much pressure, that often it is hard to focus on what’s really important to you as a designer. Also, the stars from your class are not necessarily stars of the industry!
Your final collection and the video you made for it were very distinct from the ‘usual’ BA Jewellery pieces. How do you feel about it now?
For me, the collection was just a starting point. The video helped to pull all the elements of the collection together. Film is incredible, it really has the ability to go beyond the accepted relationship we have with jewellery and enhance it. Rauwanne Northcott — who recently graduated from CSM’s Fashion Communication and Promotion course — and I played for days with a load of new and older equipment, and mashed it together. The video was also quite a breakthrough visually; just because my tutors would often tell me that my imagery was too ‘blurry’ and ‘distorted’. It didn’t fit within the norms of the traditional jewellery industry.
