This new appointment will mark the jewellery house’s strategic foray into developing a new language for its accessories segment. While Mary Katrantzou comes from a womenswear and architectural design background, tackling this genre will not be an entirely new concept. Her graduate collection for her MA in womenswear at Central Saint Martins saw silhouettes that explored jewellery within the fashion spectrum. It has been an ongoing dialogue that she has engaged with in her previous collections as well.
“My inspiration always came from outside of fashion, so I wanted to find a way to create an image that doesn’t exist in the world. And that could be inspired by the filtered beauty that you find in design, whether it’s in jewellery, or ceramics, or interiors,” explains Katrantzou over a Zoom call. Consider the final result an undressed recipe, or a finely mulled reduction of what you see. With her debut assortment called the Mary Katrantzou Calla Collection for Bvlgari for instance, the scaled Serpenti transforms into ingenious handles on quilted leather. Another bag comes with a bejewelled exterior. “That was my point of interest— how do you filter existing symbols in design, translate that into fashion and allow that to be as definitive as a cut or a drape?”
