From left: Jade Trau, Nora Kogan, Wing Yin Yau.
The Storyteller: Jade Trau
“Jewelry is the only thing where someone tells me a story, and it will be a story I want to hear.”
Jade Trau was born and raised in the business, and she wants to make sure her love and understanding of diamonds transmits to the next generation of consumers. This smart, multi-tasking mother of twin boys describes her line as “a version of a classic” and “jewelry that you will love 20 years later.”
Trau believes in the power of jewelry to record personal histories. She says customers frequently want to look at the stacked rings she’s wearing and recreate the look, but that’s entirely not the point. She laughs as she shows a large side-set marquise diamond from her grandmother, next to a band bought in a rush on the way to her own wedding: “My stack is my story. Each ring means something to me, to my life.”
Recently, however, watching mothers and daughters at a trunk show, she realized that the younger set was just not responding to jewelry the same way the mothers were. Somehow it wasn’t individual enough for a generation obsessed with customization. For these young women, jewelry didn’t resonate.
This experience inspired a new collection, designed with those girls in mind. Alchemy by Jade Trau x Forevermark will launch in March 2018 and features four diamond shapes, each representing a set of attributes and personality types. The pear shape, for example, has migrated into The Envoy — a woman who is creative, intuitive and compassionate. These reimagined fancy shapes sit in a variety of on-trend pieces, including modern, chunky signet rings; interchangeable ear jackets; and airy pendants that long to be layered.
jadetrau.com
The Globalist: Nora Kogan
“The engagement ring is the most meaningful piece of jewelry that you’re going to own. It’s symbolic and sentimental.”
If you’re a hip girl in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, and you’re looking for a cool new piece of jewelry or an offbeat engagement ring, a trip to Nora Kogan’s studio should be on your to-do list. Born in Russia, Kogan grew up playing with a Faberge egg that belonged to her grandmother. Her family moved to Australia, where the aspiring designer skipped school to sneak to the local library to read “every single copy of
Vogue in the archives,” she recalls. She then trained as a goldsmith, and when she moved to New York, she brought her bench with her, jamming it into her apartment bedroom. After working just about every job in the business — diamond sorter, vault manager, production manager — she finally launched her own brand in 2004.
Kogan’s training as a sorter has given her an appreciation for unusual stones: rose cuts, black or grey diamonds, and sideways-set baguettes, which she often puts in elaborate filigree settings. While she maintains that “the stones dictate the work,” her imaginative eye and broad cultural references often result in arresting, unexpected juxtapositions. Ironically, she confides, part of her ongoing quest to design the best, coolest engagement piece has been her own identity as a gay woman, because “I was not able to be married for many years, so I was always designing the ultimate engagement ring for myself.”
As one would expect from her background and travels, her references are diverse: “I have very Catholic taste,” she laughs as she shows me a new design for a Victorian-inspired snake hoop. “I love infiltrating lots of different motifs, and I reinterpret them. I like to bring them into the present.” On her own hands is a signature enamel and gold band together with a Bondage ring and a vintage-inspired diamond solitaire. It’s the ultimate jewelry mash-up.
norakogan.com
The Sculptor: Wing Yin Yau“You, as the wearer, become the designer also.”
Fresh out of Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, Vancouver native Wing Yin Yau couldn’t get work as a studio assistant or in a gallery, so she was obliged to earn a living as a barista and a nanny. “Both myself and my parents were super disappointed in my art degree,” she recalls. As people who meet her have come to learn, that statement is very Yin Yau: understated, dry, considered.
Early on, she started making textile wearable sculptures, hand-dyed and experimental. She tested them on her coffee-shop customers and soon realized she was limiting her market. These pieces quickly evolved into multiples that used more traditional jewelry materials. Suddenly, there was a collection, and a brand. That brand was WWAKE.
Looking at WWAKE jewelry, one is frequently surprised by the grandeur of small things. The pieces — often using opals and delicate diamonds — are petite, feminine and precise. For her, she says, “it’s always been about texture, using a minimalist approach to show off the materials’ natural properties and beauty.”
Educating the customer is key. “I think that millennials don’t know anything about stones.… They haven’t been actively marketed to…and they have an aversion to diamonds because of the movie Blood Diamond,” Yin Yau says. This insight drives a lot of the WWAKE marketing: A recent Instagram story elegantly showed the source material — in this case, a rough opal — evolve over a series of images into a finished ring.
Another core tenet of the brand is that all the pieces are stackable, allowing clients to play with individual elements and curate their own collections. The WWAKE creator says this was originally unintentional, but now it’s something the brand encourages with customers. And it makes commercial sense: Often a client will come in for a ring and leave with two, and maybe come back later to refresh their collection. It’s important to Yin Yau that as the customer’s style changes over time, their rings can change with them and stay relevant to their lives. “To me, as a businessperson, it’s extremely relieving,” she says.
wwake.comArticle from the Rapaport Magazine - December 2017. To subscribe click here.