August 28, 2025 |
It’s August in the city and you’re doomscrolling again – emails, invoices, that relentless stream of notifications. Then, through the haze, something shimmers: molten, iridescent, stubbornly alive. Glass, but not the sort your mum fretted over in the china cabinet. This is glass reimagined, unbuttoned and hand-sculpted. This is JoliPNJ.
The name itself belongs to Chloé Foulquier, a designer whose jewellery doesn’t simply exist so much as happen. Her medium? Borosilicate glass, the quiet overachiever of the glass world, prized for its resilience and heat resistance. Think lab beakers and space shuttle windows, but now shaped into rings that look as if they’ve been plucked from a coral reef or the dreamscape of a surrealist painter. Each piece is coaxed into being with a blowtorch, oxygen, gas and a little emotional volatility – because no two flames ever burn quite the same way.
Before founding Paris-based brand JoliPNJ in 2024, Foulquier cut her teeth in the world of high fashion – working at Balmain, where precision, drama and craft were non-negotiable. That training left its mark, not in the form of rigid rules, but in the confidence to bend and eventually break them. Moving from structured ateliers into the unpredictability of molten glass, she carved out her own language of design: one rooted in instinct, surrender and risk.
And so: colours bloom unexpectedly, textures gather and warp under the heat’s persuasion, and what emerges is less “designed” than discovered. There are no blueprints here, no polite sketches taped above the workbench. Foulquier’s process is about surrender. She doesn’t draw what she’s going to make – how could she, when molten glass refuses to be tamed by two-dimensional lines? Instead, it’s all about the conversation between material and maker, a kind of trust fall with fire. She calls it capturing “a moment, an emotion, a gesture” and crystallising it forever.
Earlier this week, JoliPNJ flung open its virtual doors, debuting three permanent ranges alongside the Lab – a place where experimental, ultra-limited pieces reign. Think of the Lab as Foulquier’s sketchbook, only the pages are molten, iridescent and might just outlast you. Every drop follows the rhythm of her own inspiration rather than a market calendar. Which means no cookie-cutter collections, no endless churn of near-identical stock – just the raw, slightly dangerous thrill of knowing you might miss it if you blink.
JoliPNJ isn’t asking you to keep up. It’s asking you to slow down. To find the ring that feels like it’s been waiting for you since before you knew you were looking. Because in a world hurtling towards automation, here’s a small rebellion: jewellery that remembers the human touch, one shimmering fragment at a time.
ON THE BIRTH OF JOLIPNJ
When I left Balmain, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do next. I wanted to start my own project, but I had no clear idea of what shape it would take. I just told myself: try everything that draws you in. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to work directly with materials. I think I gravitated towards jewellery because I loved working with metal accessories while I was at Balmain. I was also drawn to sculpture. So I took a one-week course where I discovered the technique of lost-wax casting. It felt magical, shaping wax and watching it transform into metal.
At the same time, I watched a Netflix series about glassblowers “Blown away” and I was mesmerised. I tried an initiation course in glassblowing, but once I came back to Paris, it was complicated to keep going. Then, I discovered the work of Michi Suzuki, a Japanese artist who works with glass using a blowtorch. I reached out to her and she trained me for a year. After that, I bought my own equipment, started experimenting and later took another course in scientific glassmaking at CERFAV. Very organically, JoliPNJ was born. I didn’t want to start from a concept, I wanted to let the experiments shape the project. The pieces began to tell me their own story.
“PNJ” means NPC, the non-player characters in video games. There is the main character, and then there are the NPCs. They are stuck in loops, repeating the same actions endlessly. I found something very poetic in that. The name comes from a personal anecdote. One day a baker spoke rudely to me and I was upset. A friend told me, “they are just NPCs,” meaning “don’t let it get to you.” I thought that was beautiful as a philosophy. At the same time, I had an Instagram account where I posted photos of passersby seen from behind in the street, which I found very beautiful. And in French, joli means “pretty.” So I named this Instagram JoliPNJ. When I started creating my project, it was a way for me to break out of a loop in which I felt stuck, to build my own universe. I was that JoliPNJ. And my pieces became the passage that allowed me to step out of it and imagine another world.
The transition was both natural and disruptive. At Balmain, what I loved most were the early stages of a collection: researching inspiration, building a story from Olivier Rousteing’s inputs, creating moodboards, making mock-ups. But fashion, within the houses, also operates within a system where merchandising plays a major role. You study the market, the competitors, what already exists, in order to position yourself and create. Collections follow and overlap at a relentless pace. The idea of luxury, as I experienced it, no longer felt aligned with me.
With JoliPNJ, I wanted to listen to what truly made sense for me. To slow down. To take the time to search, to experiment, to observe, to pause, to return. To give myself time to be amazed. To let exploration be the starting point. To connect with the material and with my imagination. I also wanted to create a connection with the people who wear my pieces so they wouldn’t just be disconnected objects.
I was also convinced that to bring something new and different, it wasn’t enough to simply translate an idea onto paper. It’s through direct experimentation with the material that accidents, the unexpected and therefore renewal – can emerge.
ON HER CREATIVE PROCESS
I work alone, in my studio. As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, I need that space just for myself in order to create. When I arrive, I burn a little vetiver powder. Then I look at some of my pieces. I often hide them under a sheet of paper so I don’t see them all the time, it allows me to rediscover them with more distance, a fresh eye. And above all, it keeps me from getting stuck in what I’ve already done, leaving room for the present. Sometimes I don’t touch the glass at all. I observe my pieces, take photos, experiment. I also use Photoshop, AI, 3D or video to imagine their universe. For me, the pieces are not an end in themselves, they belong to something larger. When I work with glass, I put on music depending on my mood, from Christine and the Queens to Björk, Beyoncé, rap, or even traditional Chinese music. That atmosphere influences what I create. I like working in series, creating families of unique pieces rather than isolated objects: it allows me to immerse myself and unfold an aesthetic in an organic way.
At the beginning of my project, I spent a lot of time researching in a free and intuitive way. Then, when I wanted to present my pieces, I looked at the whole and selected the ones that spoke to me the most, the ones I most wanted to wear. That became the starting point for my first collection. In the end, a piece can come to life quite quickly, because it is the result of months of experimentation.
I don’t sketch my pieces in advance. I start from the material, from the gesture, from an experiment. The form often comes out of an accident. I choose my glass rods intuitively, I turn on the kiln, the torch and I begin to sculpt. I add, remove, flatten, stretch… It’s a dialogue in the present, a drawing in three dimensions. Since the glass is burning hot, I can’t try the piece on; I freeze a moment in time and I have to wait until the next day, after annealing, to truly discover it and see it worn. What I love is this imposed rhythm, like when developing an analog photograph: the waiting and then the wonder of discovery.
Sometimes I have an obsession with certain colours and I know I want to work with them. Other times, I walk into the studio and look at my glass rods. The choice is always instinctive: I take a few out, look at them, put them in the sunlight, place them on my hand, observe them side by side, put them back. And if a combination draws me in, I follow it.
With glass, colour is directly tied to the material. It is both the substance and the surface. Its transparency and fluidity make it even more alive: shades fuse, become a new matter and reveal themselves differently depending on the light, the thickness or the shape of the piece. Depending on the time of day or the ambient light, the piece evolves, shifts, transforms. I love the idea of sculpting light and colour adds an extra dimension.
ON THE JOLIPNJ DESIGN LANGUAGE
[JoliPNJ is] free, because I let the material take shape without forcing it into a fixed idea, the pieces become what they are meant to be. Organic, because it’s a dialogue between my intuition, my emotions, and the glass, which is itself a living material. Weird, because I’m not looking for a polished or expected beauty, but a beauty that is alive, unique. And intimate, because they are born without filters, carrying a part of me before finding their place in someone else’s intimacy.
I see my pieces as both jewellery and sculpture. Miniature sculptures that find their place on the body. Since I can’t try them on while creating them, I never know exactly how they will exist once they are worn. I like that they first live as objects, and then enter another dimension when someone wears them.
At the beginning of the project, I made a list of people I would love to see wearing my pieces. But what I find most beautiful is when someone tries on a piece and a kind of intimate connection happens, something a little magical and inexplicable. Like an encounter. That’s what moves me the most.
ON WORKING WITH GLASS
For me, working with glass is a way of crystallising a suspended moment in matter. It’s an ode to the living. A way to reconnect to the senses, and therefore to oneself. It’s also what makes it possible to connect with what surrounds us, with the magic of the world, with a raw kind of beauty. The idea of connection is essential in my work: connection to oneself, to others, to the material. This approach also ties into sustainability. I work in small series, on a human scale, with glass, a material that can be melted down and reformed. I choose eco-responsible packaging made in Europe. But beyond these practical aspects, for me it’s a global mindset: slowing down, welcoming accidents, breathing, making space for wonder. It’s a way of inhabiting the world more humbly, more poetically, while being aware of its beauty, its strength, and its fragility.
I start with a glass rod in its solid state. The oxygen and gas that feed the flame allow me to melt it until it becomes almost like honey. I play with these two states: solid and liquid, but also with gravity. For my Space Oddity line, I use special types of glass that contain metals such as silver or copper, which react to the atmosphere of the flame. Depending on the oxygen/gas balance, different effects emerge in the glass. At first, my work with this kind of glass happened by accident: I didn’t expect that an opaque beige rod would transform in the flame into a deep, subtle blue, full of nuances and metallic reflections.
For me, technical limits are not obstacles. Glass is a special material – burning hot, sensitive, sometimes unpredictable. You can’t try it on while working; you have to move forward with your eyes and your intuition. I accept these constraints, I work with them, and often they serve the outcome. They guide my gestures, they open up possibilities I would never have imagined.
ON WHAT INSPIRES HER
I watch a lot of documentaries about nature, volcanoes, whales, octopuses, plants, fungi. The living world fascinates me. We search for life elsewhere, but the one around us is already so rich and magical. I also take a lot of photos… of everything. Textures, colours. And I film moments, often of matter in motion. Books have also inspired me a lot. Not directly in the form my pieces take, but in the process. For example Éloge de la main by Henri Focillon, [Pierre] Soulages la peinture, Poétique de l’accident by Henri Darasse or L’Objet magique by Ettore Sottsass. Films and animé as well. Paprika, for instance, which explores dreams, the unconscious and the perception of reality. Inception, Arrival, Blade Runner, Interstellar, Avatar, and so on. Science fiction makes it possible to glimpse other realities. In the end, my inspirations infuse like a process of distillation. I like to engage in a dialogue with the material and tell its story: it’s my way of sharing what I see, what I feel and of opening up a space.
ON THE FUTURE OF JOLIPNJ
I want to keep exploring what I’ve started and expanding the universe of JoliPNJ. Little by little, I
would like to open up new directions, maybe move towards larger pieces and continue to explore material in a broader sense. One day I would also love to show my work in galleries, travel with this project and do some cool collaborations. But above all, I want to keep creating and sharing what I find beautiful, and to nurture a space where imagination, connection and wonder can continue to grow.
Photography courtesy of JoliPNJ.
