March 20, 2024 |
BLINGIN’ IT IS TEN’S ONLINE SERIES WHERE WE SPOTLIGHT THE INNOVATORS AND CHANGE-MAKERS OF THE JEWELLERY WORLD.
When interdisciplinary artist and designer Lia Lowenthal founded her jewellery brand LL, LLC back in 2017, she set herself a rather unique goal: to make jewellery for people who don’t normally wear jewellery. Now a Martine Rose-approved brand, it’s everything you’d imagine a New York-born, Los Angeles-raised artist and designer to create. It’s clever, effortlessly sexy and as Lowenthal says, invokes the essence of “a woman from the Upper East Side who looks like she might shove you.” Gritty, right?
The New York-based brand began brewing in 2015 almost by accident, following one of Lowenthal’s art exhibitions (which featured abstract images of jewellery displays alongside unwearable jewellery that she created to balance on the body) where a friend suggested that she sell the collection as well, wearable jewellery. With no formal jewellery-making training (Lowenthal is a fine art graduate from UCLA with an additional MA in photography from Bard College), and as someone who rarely flashes glitz and glam herself, she received her silversmith education elsewhere. And where better to learn than William Spratling’s estate in Taxco, Mexico? The home of a man widely considered to be one of the most influential and intriguing jewellers of the twentieth century, Spratling was an American designer, architect and silversmith who worked to innovate the techniques and methods used by the silver industry throughout the ’20s and ’30s. He created some of the most significant silver pieces in history at his studio, Taller de las Delicias (Workshop of the Delights). Often referred to as the “father of Mexican silver”, his Taxco estate, now called Casa Spratling or Taller William Spratling, still functions as a silversmithing workshop, and this is where the LL, LLC founder learned to make everything by hand.
It’s safe to say that when Lowenthal settled in to her Bronx studio, she was well equipped with all the necessary skills for building a brand that prides itself on functional, hand-crafted designs inspired by archival references from Art Deco to antiquity. As much sculpture as it is jewellery, each made-to-order piece she creates is intentionally elegant yet simple enough for everyday wear. A testament to the brand’s longevity is its repeated use of a signature spiral motif – a callback to the original art exhibition that kickstarted Lowenthal’s jewellery-making career – with swirls of sterling silver and gold vermeil appearing to wrap around the fingers and earlobes of wearers.
After one of fashion’s favourite Londoners Martine Rose stumbled upon an LL, LLC piece in a local shop, she reached out to Lowenthal to propose a collaboration – talk about an entrance into the fashion world. To accompany Rose’s AW23 collection, shown at the Florentine menswear fair Pitti Uomo, Lowenthal revived and re-coded masculine symbols through a feminine lens by transforming mixed-metal cufflinks and gold oyster watch bands into earrings and creating a daring coin pendant necklace carved with 1960s feminist slogans plucked straight off of historical protest signs. The pair’s second collaboration was a hot topic during the SS24 season, literally. It included handmade gold matchsticks with burnt and unburnt red enamel tips, looping and coiling around fingers, wrists and ears. Following this success, LL, LLC announced a collaboration with ready-to-wear and accessories brand A–Company this past November for its 9 1/2 collection.
Here, we caught up with Lowenthal to discuss everything from her recent interest in the sleaze of mid-century casinos and the post-punk music found booming outside her New York studio, to the exciting new ventures she’s planning to embark on for 2024.
LL, LLC x A–Company 9 1/2
ON LL, LLC’S BEGINNINGS
Lowenthal: “LL, LLC began as an art project. In 2015, I had an exhibition of jewellery-like sculptures, which I titled Gethens, that you could only wear by balancing them on the body – no closures or fasteners – that were inspired by social infrastructure, such as public water systems or air traffic control signals. It was about how the way we coexist with social systems is tenuous and at times, absurd, and difficult to reconcile. They were very abstracted, and looked a bit like a futuristic Art Deco. A friend later suggested that I try to actually sell them as jewellery, so I thought, why not, it could be a fun experiment. We pitched it around – and I even had a meeting at the Vogue offices – but of course there wasn’t much of a market for high concept non-wearable jewellery at a department store.
“The name is a combination of my initials, Lia Lowenthal, and LLC, which is a limited liability corporation, a company type in the US (similar to a “limited” in the UK). It was something I thought of off-hand and when I jokingly said to a friend that it could be a name, it stuck.”
ON HONING HER SKILLS AT THE WILLIAM SPRATLING ESTATE
Lowenthal: “William Spratling died long before I was born – but I met the steward of his estate through a friend in 2017. We first started chatting on Facebook, and I would send them pictures of my non-wearable pieces, Gethens, to see how they could recreate them out of other metals by hand (the originals were 3D printed) – which they did flawlessly based on my bad cell phone photos. They invited me to come visit shortly after, and I was able to work in the same workshop that he built for himself, with his original tools, the furniture he designed, parrots, and an alligator named Giacomo that lived in its own pool. I knew nothing about how to make jewellery when I went there, and I learned so much. They make everything by hand, from scratch – it’s incredible.”
“I still had no idea what starting a business was really, and had no experience in the fashion industry. But I was immediately drawn to the magic of seeing metal transform into jewellery – the tools, the techniques, the history. I just wanted to keep making it and sharing it with people, so that’s how the brand started to grow.”
ON WHAT INSPIRERS HER
Lowenthal: “Enduring jewellery influences are vintage Cartier, Italian Brutalism, and 60s Mexican Modernism, for the exquisite uses of positive and negative space and bold compositions and textures. I also love jewellery that has borderline perverse lineages, like a lot of Victorian jewellery, which have a strange relationship to the body and mortality. Lately I’ve been researching mid-century casinos – the decor, lighting, fashion, sleaze – I love it all. I love the play with illusion, deception, and chance, which is an interesting way to think about jewellery and identity.”
LL, LLC x Martine Rose AW23
ON MAKING JEWELLERY WITH MARTINE ROSE (AND FUTURE COLLABORATIONS)
Lowenthal: “Martine and her team are such a dream! Working with Martine was my first collaboration, and it was so special. Martine really lets the research take her where it needs to go, and it ends up coming together like a perfectly imperfect collage. It’s different from the way I work, but I really enjoyed the process because of that. I loved what we made together.
“I really enjoy working with fashion designers, who may have not had the opportunity to envision their concepts as jewellery, and I love how it can enrich their overall narrative and become part of a larger world. Working with someone like Bless would be such a bucket-list moment, I’ve been a fan of theirs for many years.
“I would also love to create some jewellery or jewellery-type sculpture for a movie (does someone want to do another Deadringers remake?). And to make something functional, like eyewear or silverware. But most importantly I just would like to continue working with fun, interesting, smart people.”
LL, LLC x Martine Rose AW23
ON HER CREATIVE PROCESS
Lowenthal: “When developing my pieces, I usually start with a sketch drawn on a post-it before the idea evaporates, or an email to myself with a few words about the concept. Then I sketch it either on my iPad to refine it more, or take it to Rhino to develop it in CAD. I sometimes use wax for hand carving, but I don’t use it as much as I’d like to at the moment. After I get the first brass cast back, then I begin to work on it more by hand at the bench, getting to know it, and also understanding how (or if) it could be readied for production and finishing. Then wear it for at least a month to see how I feel about it. It’s usually the pieces I have the most scepticism about which are the ones that end up being the strongest.
“My studio is always a mess. I have two jewellery benches that are always full of projects and experiments, walls covered with various prints and images, a giant calendar, a giant whiteboard, project boards, project binders, invoices and receipts, random strips of chain, abandoned sculptures, weird trash that I become attached to, stacks of books, two big windows with a view of the expressway (and the New York City marathon once a year), and a yoga mat for taking floor naps. As much as I try to instil order, chaos reigns day to day. I work primarily alone, although I do have some help occasionally. Music is usually a lot of dub, shoegaze-y ambient, and post-punk, or NPR when I need to feel there is life on the other side of the line to get myself out of my head.
“I primarily work in sterling silver, gold vermeil (gold plated sterling silver), and 14 karat and 10 karat gold. All my work is either made in my studio in the Bronx, or the Diamond District in midtown NYC. I truly love working with silver, it’s such a resilient metal, but gold is starting to find a place in my heart, there is nothing that beads the weight and warmth of it.”
LL, LLC x Martine Rose SS24
ON JEWELLERY-MAKING AS AN ARTFORM
Lowenthal: “[My education influenced me] in so many ways. Scale in relationship to the body, thinking about forms that have a compelling composition from all dimensions, and not just “the front.” Translating language into form. Inventing tools, inventing techniques, which is actually such a huge cornerstone of making jewellery. Everyone develops their own evolving language with how they work with it and it’s really beautiful. I feel not having a conventional jewellery background has really given me such a different frame of reference to creating it, since I don’t have the education in the typical forms and techniques, I feel first and foremost I’m making sculptures that interact with the body.”
ON LL, LLC’S SIGNATURE SPIRAL MOTIF
Lowenthal: “The spiral motif was my first design for the Gethens series, that I felt there was a lot of potential in it formally and conceptually. It’s based on the spiral methodology, which is a business strategy that forgoes revision of a product in order to bring it to market faster – it’s higher risk, but can be enormously profitable if it works. When I was first making jewellery, I realised the same spiral form could actually serve that purpose – it’s a form that can be made with relative ease and requires no soldering – creating a high quality, efficient design that could be made all by hand. The spiral motif also has a long historical antecedent, with similar designs dating back to ancient Rome. I loved how it persisted throughout history and has a rich symbolism.”
ON WORKING SUSTAINABLY
Lowenthal: “I make all my jewellery made-to-order, so there is no overproduction. And thankfully, the nature of jewellery lends itself to sustainable practices by being able to reuse, scrap, and refine production waste. When a piece doesn’t work, I’m able to scrap it or melt it down to reuse the material. I would really like to find a way to make post-consumer metals more accessible to emerging jewellery producers.”
ON THE FUTURE OF LL, LLC
Lowenthal: “I’m currently developing a new capsule collection for LL, LLC to be released later this year, which will be new and different from what I’ve done in the past and I’m very excited about it. And as part of my art practice, I’m writing a book that will be published by Ligature Press later in 2024.”
Photography courtesy of LL, LLC.
