“I don’t like twee jewellery. I like an element of danger and darkness,” says Solange Azagury-Partridge. The London based jeweller’s collections feature necklaces that ooze red lacquer and ruby blood, earrings resembling enamelled Medusa heads or Halloween skeletons, and a blackened gold wedding ring that appears honed from bone. For Azagury-Partridge’s latest collection, Frankenstone, it’s the pieced-together dimensions of Mary Shelley’s monster that have formed the starting point, inspiring an offering where conventional jewellery designs, like single stone and signet rings appear to have been dissected and reassembled. Necklaces, rings and cuffs appear as ghostly shadows of themselves, and the raw materials of jewellery design are set loose from their settings.
The multi-year design process (“the pieces have driven me nuts!” laughs Azagury-Partridge) all started with the collection’s Hololith pieces, which feature “extremely fragile” chunky rings entirely cut from emerald-cut citrine or rock crystal, sprinkled with diamonds or encased with gold leaf. In Azagury-Partridge’s humour-driven style (her bestselling Hotlips ring resembles a mouth shaped into a glossy pout), the pieces sit between something plucked from a kids’ dressing-up box and what she refers herself to as “solid light”. She adds: “I was thinking about these amazing Lalique domed rings that were carved from glass.”
“I’m a great believer in make do and mend,” adds Azagury-Partridge. “I’ll fix clothing until it’s literally in rags and shreds,” she laughs, referring to a wardrobe that includes metallic Margiela Tabi boots and plenty of striped denim. With Frankenstone, she was captivated by the idea of her jewellery breaking and being rebuilt: 50:50 and Split rings, crafted from 18-carat gold, white gold and blackened white gold appear as excavated treasures, as if they have been cracked open, shimmering with seemingly splintered rubies, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires, tourmaline, amethyst and peridot, in emerald, marquise and dodecahedron, and Platonic star cuts. “People are getting wise to the fact you don’t have to buy jewellery made using traditional cuts,” smiles Azagury-Partridge, whose first design in 1987, was an engagement ring, with an uncut diamond. “But it took a long time for me to find the people to attempt this strange faceting,” she smiles. “I looked everywhere and in the end the pieces were designed here in London.”
The collection also features a suite of – shot glasses, a trinket box and dish – honed from star-motif carved rock crystal and set with diamonds. They inspired some of the most eye-catching necklaces in Frankenstone (“my collections are always so ring heavy” Azagury-Partridge laughs), which include rock crystal pouches strung on leather rope, carrying kaleidoscopic loose gemstones inside them, like tiny goldfish bowls full of treasure. “There are so many pretty things around,” Azagury-Partridge says. “If I’m going to design pieces, they had better be unexpected.”
