by Alice Lambert
New York based jeweller, Samantha Siu, has created a brand which offers exquisite fine jewellery with an extremely personal inspiration behind it.
Her coveted line, titled ‘The Love Affair collection’, debuted in 2019 and each piece is inspired by Samantha’s personal travels with her first love. Their journeys to locations across the globe led to the creation of this 10-piece collection, influenced from momentous Roman churches to Thailand’s endangered elephants.
As a result, her jewellery blends high fashion with rich culture, but also her personal history to showcase and preserve beauty from around the world.
Her necklace designs are bold using chunky gold, rose gold, and silver chains, as well as sizeable bespoke clasps.
This boldness is intertwined with intricate detail and attractive gemstones to create pieces that are both powerful and beautiful, reflecting features of the real-life inspiration for the designs.
Each necklace is complemented with a matching pair of earrings to offer a complete look. The genius of Samantha Siu’s work doesn’t just come from the inspiration for its designs, it is woven into its creation itself.
The brand also incorporates the tradition of wax carving into their jewellery making process, a technique dated back to 4,000 BC, bringing a new visibility to this ancient practice with a modern twist.
Sustainability is also close to Samantha Siu’s heart, shown by the versatility of the collection. Every piece is designed to offer more than one way of wearing, creating multiple different looks, and giving the individual the freedom to decide how they want to wear their jewellery.
Samantha also notes how this approach “decreases their repurchase footprint” and highlights that their process of creation of each piece takes around 5-6 months, in turn producing a brand that incorporates the values of slow fashion.
The necklaces feature a reversible design, with either the gemstones or clasp available to wear around the neck. This inventive design also means that as much attention can be drawn to the wearer’s back, creating a visually stunning necklace from all angles. With backless silhouettes dominating the red carpets, Samantha Siu’s designs allow for jewellery to be seamlessly incorporated into this trend.
The complementary earring collection has been labelled as “revolutionary”, with each pair created to be worn in a minimum of two different styles suitable from classic working daywear to dazzling statement earrings for the evening. One set, ‘The Eternity Earrings’ can be worn in a spectacular 22 different ways; that’s over 3 weeks of different earring looks!
The brands aspiration for sustainability also come through the desire for each piece to be an investment. Samantha Siu’s jewellery hopes to move away from ideas of fast fashion and instead offer jewellery made to last and passed onto future generations to be loved and treasured.
As social media trends begin to turn away from consuming every new fashion trend and focus more on the concept of creating a ‘timeless wardrobe’, it is refreshing to see this perspective applied to jewellery as well.
With such personal and creative designs, we look forward to seeing what next Samantha Siu brings to her jewellery.
Edited by Emily Duff