Marla Aaron thinks DIY shops are underrated. The award-winning jewellery designer and New York native’s love of latches, pulleys, gears and handles started young. Her mother would find padlocks instead of toys stowed in her childhood bag. Fast forward a few decades and Aaron’s distinctive carabiner lock, modelled after those used in climbing gear, is the cornerstone of her business, which launched in 2013. Both were born from a realisation that “the magic of hardware-store carabiners, fasteners and pulleys could play a role in jewellery”.
If you geek out when unfolding her interlocking DiMe Siempre (meaning ‘tell me always’) bracelets or rings to see their personalised hand-engraved messages inside, Aaron understands. In fact, she designed these pieces with such ‘aha’ moments in mind. Minutes into our Zoom, I am treated to a live demo from her London hotel room. In the capital to launch her collection in Liberty’s storied jewellery hall, Aaron, who is 54, shows me the clasp of her Rolling Spheres bracelet, which has stones that move and roll set into the band. The sound of the crisp click of its closure is no less satisfying over a video call. A self-described Anglophile, Aaron didn’t realise right away that the launch in Liberty was confirmed. “British people are just so measured. I had a meeting at Liberty and I don’t think I quite understood that I was being offered this space.” She then shows me how to wear her vibrant Fordite (named after the byproduct of car paint overspray) earrings as a pendant, holding the patented zipline-like clasp up to the camera. Delight and surprise are clearly the objectives. Her 2016 jewellery vending machine installations, placed in the Brooklyn Museum and Rockefeller Center in New York, are cases in point.
The jewellery is as layered and multidimensional as the woman herself. As a newly divorced single mother, Aaron began her namesake brand on her lunch breaks in the diamond district in Manhattan, where she tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get her ideas produced. While Aaron never doubted that she “had to do this”, leaving her advertising career of 25 years to found her company in 2012, those early days required grit and resourcefulness. She developed her first website with help from a programmer she found via Craigslist and enlisted her then-teenage sons to help create her social media profiles. Despite challenging odds and fuzzy early photos, the response “was almost instantaneous – people started placing orders and we had a business”. She was slow to hire her first employee, so a friend intervened and interviewed candidates; 25 employees and 12 years later, like many good ideas, Aaron’s success now seems inevitable. Yet when accepting the 2024 GEM Award for jewellery design, she acknowledged that her success wasn’t a given, thanking those who supported her, including her husband, David, and children.
Marla Aaron has brought her tactile and transformable pieces, based on carabiner clips, to Liberty’s famed jewellery room
Aaron thinks brands don’t always understand how we buy jewellery. “People don’t come into wearing jewellery to [get] a whole look. That’s not how people wear anything. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” There’s not a single piece in her collections that’s meant to be one-dimensional or worn in a specific way. Flexibility and changeability are built in to her designs. Elasticated strands, sold as Thingys, resembling hairbands can extend necklaces and chains can be linked together to make long, layered pieces. Aaron demonstrates this by turning her gold Trundle bracelet into a choker necklace using an orange Thingy. Chains are even sold without clasps, so wearers can layer and link them with multiple locks. The Fiddling Series includes tactile pieces designed to be touched and moved, including the organic, serpentine Myriad lock, which looks like an interlocking infinity symbol. Its unique mechanism originated from a drawing that took her team more than two years to perfect, evolving from the Pushmipullyu pendant. Aaron creates yet another aha movement when she shows me how each side of the Myriad lock springs open.
Most people don’t know how much craftsmanship goes into creating movement in their favourite jewellery. Maybe that’s for the best. When an audience watches a dance performance, the impression of effortlessness is the desired effect. When I note that Aaron’s love of movement and mechanisms makes her more of an architect-meets-jewellery designer, she demurs, preferring “designer-ish” while praising her team for helping to bring even the most unorthodox ideas to life. “The production manager has to turn the sample into something that we can produce over and over again.” For example, when trying to show the team how easily she wanted the Trundle lock to work, she says, “I racked my brain to find a way to explain how I wanted it to be. When I was changing the toilet [roll spring-loaded metal holder] I was like, ‘There it is, that’s it.’ That is how easy it should be.”
A rare individual who finds beauty in everyday objects that most of us take for granted, Aaron even had friends send her photos of different types of London bricks to create a mosaic-like inlay series ahead of her launch at Liberty. Inspirations range from toilet rolls to toy trains (the Zephyr bracelet), ziplines, hairbands, and his-and-hers 17th-century chatelaines (belt hooks) her friend Ismael Khan, a collector of vintage jewellery, found at Portobello Market (Musgrave locks for bracelets, necklaces and more). You’d be forgiven for thinking Aaron is as much of an inventor, with several US patents on her work, as she is an award-winning jewellery designer.
In her Liberty display case: clockwise from top left: locks, necklaces and bracelets in 14k yellow gold, 14k rose gold, 14k white gold, platinum and diamonds by Marla Aaron
If jewellery tells a story, it follows that jewellery designers are storytellers, and Aaron knows how to spin a good yarn. Victorian women used vinaigrette boxes in the late 19th century to mask unpleasant odours, so Aaron created a box charm with an open grid back, which can be used to carry a hint of your favourite perfume sprayed on a cotton ball. The Musgrave lock was inspired by a vintage pair of his-and-hers Victorian chatelaines engraved with the names H Musgrave and I Musgrave. The Musgrave family date back to the 13th century in England, and chatelaines would have been used to hold important items like keys to the precious tea box. Starting with a simple lock mechanism, Aaron later developed the piece into a bracelet, necklace, Baby Musgrave ring and Micro Musgrave gem-encrusted charm holder (a millegrain-finished piece with a single set diamond). The lock has a unique twisting mechanism that opens, bringing the past into the present with yet another satisfying click.
Some jewellery designers create with themselves in mind. Yet while Aaron clearly enjoys wearing her jewellery, she also wants to know how you wear yours, and this makes her designs easier to customise and personalise. As a champion of hand-engraving jewellery using local craftspeople, Aaron describes engraving as “one of the most precious things” she offers. She also created The String Project collection, made from the woven synthetic Dyneema, which has never been used in jewellery before and is said to be the strongest fibre in the world. It looks like climbing ropes, allowing even more flexibility with how people wear their jewellery. The aim is for her jewellery to be “hardworking”, with the ability to do more than one thing.
Aaron’s love of bringing joy to others through jewellery is also inspired by her personal circumstances. She describes having been a single mother as one of the most challenging times of her life. “As soon as I could, I wanted to do something for single mothers, so we created the hashtag #lockyourmom project 10 years ago.” The project gifts small silver heart locks to single mums who have been nominated on Mother’s Day. She gave 50 locks away in the first year and has doubled that number every year since. For the past four years she has also collaborated with Henry Street Settlement – a community centre on the Lower East Side that helps unhoused single mothers – to host a day including lunch and art projects for the children and gift bags for their mums. “The first time we did it, it was pure fun,” Aaron says with a smile. She even brought the project to London for an in-person #lockyourmom gifting event in Liberty.
bracelets, locks and necklaces in 14k yellow gold, 14k rose gold, 14k white gold, platinum and diamonds by Marla Aaron
Wearing jewellery isn’t an essential need, Aaron concedes, but it does allow us to connect with the most important parts of ourselves. It’s a tool for self-expression, a mechanism to tell the stories that help make meaning of our lives. And maybe that’s enough. Aaron’s work glorifies utility in the everyday mechanics of a humble lock or pulley, but the treatment is far from utilitarian. Its form follows function, but with a joy quotient that sets it apart.
Photography by Anna Stokland. Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 75 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
