You’d never imagine being asked to pierce the ears of one of your teenage idols, but five years ago, renegade London jeweller Hannah Martin found herself in that exact, heart-racing predicament. Pitched up at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood – Martin’s self-described “home from home in Los Angeles” – she received a call from her close friend Maryam Malakpour, the stylist to rock legend Joan Jett, who just so happened to be staying at the same hotel. “I headed over to her villa feeling vaguely anxious because she’s my total hero,” Martin says, with a laugh. “In the end, it was more a case of forcefully pushing an earring through an existing piercing, rather than a totally new one…” (So far, so punk!)
Following that first encounter, Martin began loaning the “Bad Reputation” singer pieces of jewellery – her suitably subversive designs include hoop earrings punctured with malachite safety pins, rings resembling kinky harnesses and razor-blade dog tags – before the pair decided to collaborate on something to mark the 45th anniversary of Jett’s version of “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”. “The conversation was really organic,” Martin says. “We began talking about creating one piece, but there was such a wealth of inspiration that I got very overexcited.”
The resulting Hannah Martin London x Joan Jett collection comprises 14 pieces of jewellery and precious accessories, rendered in sterling silver, white and yellow gold, that riff on the iconography of Jett’s legendary rock-star style. Think: high-waisted denim with zips secured by safety pins, battered leather jackets, Ramones tees, and a tangle of leather cords and chains strung with pendants. “Hannah is the designer and I was really the muse,” Jett explains, “so a lot of it started with conversations about things I’ve worn, symbols that mean something to me, and pieces from my own jewellery and closet.”
The first piece – a pacifier pendant inspired by one Jett wore religiously in the ’80s, and her favourite of the collection – has been reimagined as a sculptural, geometric orb. “There’s something very punk about taking an object like that and turning it into fine jewellery. It has an edge to it, but Hannah made it feel elevated and beautiful,” Jett adds. Elsewhere, DIY concert badges are reimagined in hand-painted enamel, leather lighter cases dangle from roadie-style lanyards, and leather cuffs are fastened with smooth sterling-silver buckles. The safety pin is reduced to its purest form, as a sculptural link in a chain, while Martin’s signature teardrop motif becomes a sleek heart, studded with spiky, reverse-set diamonds.
“It was really about stripping everything back,” Martin explains of her approach to the collection. “My design language is always about focusing on elemental forms.” And so, alongside pin-ups of Jett, Martin’s moodboard featured sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and works by Austrian designer and metalworker Carl Auböck. “It was a real mix of punk imagery and refined artistic forms.”
Martin can’t quite remember when she first heard Jett’s music, but suspects she absorbed it by osmosis from her dad’s record collection while growing up in the ’90s. “It was such a male-dominated universe and people like Joan, Courtney Love and Patti Smith became part of my musical world,” she says. Now, one of her teenage heroines has made it into her fine-jewellery hall of fame.
