March 17, 2021 |
“We’ve gone a little delirious at Alighieri HQ,” admits a giddy Rosh Mahtani over Zoom. The London-based jewellery designer has spent the past two weeks or so playing scientist, working closely with her team on a celestial project to house her latest Alighieri collection. “I really want to present [the collection] in an interesting way and use it as a vehicle to bring people together and kind of learn as well,” she says.
Inspired once more by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – in particular, its closing instalment ‘Paradiso’ – Mahtani envisioned the Wandering Stars Report; a tactile, crafty package that presents Alighieri’s AW21 collection as an imaginary scientific report.
The designers latest creations were treated not like jewellery, but fragments that have fallen from planetary spheres way up in the sky. The Alighieri team began breaking down their new creations like otherwordly objects – scanning each into the report as if they were x-rayed in a laboratory. Each jewel was then presented in a periodic table (“it was a bit like being at school”), where freshwater pearls come with craters like the moon and a clash of silvers and golds feels almost outlandish.
“We’ve always done mixed metals, but this season I really wanted to take it to the next level,” explains Mahtani. “I wanted it to feel as if the ancient world had been propelled into space and parts of a spaceship was falling off, and it’s all whirling together in this modern-day mythology.”
Add in theoretical interpretations of the collection from a yoga teacher, a geologist and a cosmic artist, and you have an enhanced experience written in the stars, which we can guarantee, will be a lot more interesting than any science lesson you had in school.
Photography by Rosh Mahtani.
