... I give to you...
... five gold rings!..
... four sassy cats...
... three ballpoint pens...
... two in/appropriate characters...
... a little souvenir.
In previous years, though I continue to call Day 5 "five gold rings", I've picked rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings... basically this is my dedicated jewellery post within the 12 Days. However this year, I thought I'd choose a type of jewellery I've never posted about before, and one that is oh so fitting.
The 2020 pandemic has been caused by SARS-CoV-2, which we have come to know as COVID-19, an acronym for "coronavirus disease 2019" coined by World Health Organisation (WHO) in a bid to avoid creating stigmatism towards the virus's origins. Though someone might to remind soon to be ex-President Trump that...
Some wacko in China just released a statement blaming everybody other than China for the Virus which has now killed hundreds of thousands of people. Please explain to this dope that it was the “incompetence of China”, and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing!
The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2020
... oh yeah... I forgot about Trump choosing to withdraw the United States from WHO... luckily for everyone even Twitter has started dinging Mr. Trump for spreading misinformation about the pandemic...
Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 6, 2020
Anyway, enough of that, back to the etymology. While Covid-19 has its own origins, coronavirus itself is simply named after its appearance, and the crown of club shaped spikes that cover its surface.
Corona, coming from the Latin for crown or garland.
So that means in 2020 crowns, tiaras and headpieces are a logical subject.
Wolf & Moon || "Wildflower Headpiece" || Laser Cut Acrylic & Birch Wood
First up is the Wildflower Headpiece by Wolf & Moon. A North London based company created by Hannah Davis, who specialise in laser-cut jewellery, using a combination of acrylic and birch wood (they also use brass, gold plated sterling silver, mother of pearl and stain and paint the wood depending on the designs but acrylic and bird appear in almost everything).
There's something silly and wonderfully whimsical about the headpieces that this brand creates and the wildflower option is not the only one. You could choose between flowers, lemons, mushrooms and past collections have features coral reefs, jungle leaves and queen of hearts inspired designs. These are statement pieces of jewellery, their not your tradition headband or tiara, they're fun. And if that's not what you're into, the brand have all your traditional jewellery in not only floral, natural designs by more architectural and geometric ones too.
I'm a little biased, I have (I think) three pairs of Wolf & Moon earrings, which I love, and while there is a more famous British based company you may know, who became iconic for their, silly and weird laser cut acrylic jewellery, I actually think that Wolf and Moon are the superior brand. Maybe their not as novel or cartoonish, but there are no poorly attached earring post, no cheap feeling chains or sharp edges. The pieces are beautifully hand finished, each engraved with their logo. Their packaging and branding is really attractive, and a handwritten thank you is added to each parcel - which if they continue to do as their company grows is a lovely touch. There is also a beautiful warmth and harmony between the acrylic and wood.
I'm not knocking the other brand. I love their designs, but the earrings I have fell to pieces and I had to glue them back together, and the necklace left scratches on my skin, pulled threads out of knitwear, and turned my skin green. I love the jewellery I have, and maybe I just got bad pieces, but for their cost, they should have been better quality.
Wolf & Moon is a brand I go back to time and again because they have good designs, good service and produce a good quality product and you don't often see jewellers making headwear, so these are pretty and fun.
Link || Wolf & Moon || Wildflower Headpiece
While I have a board on Pinterest which is dedicated to jeweller for non-obvious parts of the body (anything head to toe that isn't traditionally recognisable as a pair of earrings, a necklace, brooch, cufflinks, or bracelet), searching for tiaras, crowns or headpieces resulted in a lot of wedding wear.
I actually understand this, searching for non-commercial, what I guess you'd term art jewellery is actually not the easiest. Often on Day 5 I search for "gold rings" and the results are a sea of jewellery you'd see in your average, high street, mass produced jeweller. Which is not what I'm looking for, and when it comes to jewellery headwear, the results were beaded tiaras for brides.
Some are very pretty, but even looking for historic jewellery in this category, it wasn't fruitful, unless it was atop the head of Kate Middleton or Meghan Markle. But that's almost certainly because when do you ever really get the opportunity to wear a tiara, unless you're getting married, happen to be a princess or are a kid?
My point is, in the sea of beads and princesses, I kept seeing these really simple, modern, yet architectural leaf like outlines, which instead of perching atop, embraced the back of the models head, and added a statement to the hair, without being traditional or cheap looking.
These designs - and this Back Leaf Tiara in particular - are by Lia Terni, a Miami based ethical jeweller who uses eco-gold, recycled brass and silver, ceramics and Swarovski crystals as the main materials within her designs. Not only is it great that she is trying to source ethical and recycled materials, but I just really like the shape, positioning and simplicity of her headpiece designs.
In terms of wearable designs on this post, this is certainly higher up there.
Link || Lia Terni || Back Leaf Tiara
Link || Lia Terni || Eco Gold
Maiko Takeda || "Atmospheric Reentry" || 2013 || Silver, Acrylic and Tinted Film || Photo by Bryan Huynh
I would say with this next design, wearability isn't really realistic for the everyday person. However headpieces by Maiko Takeda are a firm favourite on the runway for designers including Issey Miyake, they have been featured as a head dress for Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, and are frequently been worn by the musician Björk.
"Atmospheric Reentry: Starting from the simple question of what it would feel like to wear a cloud, a series of sculptural head/body pieces blurs the boundaries around the wearer. Hundreds of spiky feather-like units fan out to achieve a density and lightness of form that surround the wearer in an brightly-coloured, luminescent aura." (Maiko Takeda)
These to me, even after all these years, I still find fascinating. Both in their construction and visual impact. And today, in a world where we're even more aware of the cloud that surrounds each of us and how far that stretches, the aura surrounding and emitting from the wearers is even more poignant.
It's also the headpiece on this list that looks most like Covid-19... just saying.
Link || Maiko Takeda || Atmospheric Reentry, 2013
Link || Atmospheric Reentry by Maiko Takeda, by Donnia via Fubiz
Jan Yager || Tiara of Useful Knowledge: City Flora Series || 2006 || Oxidised Sterling Silver with 18k & 14k Gold || Photo by Jack Ramsdale
The most "traditional" tiara on todays list is by mixed-media jeweller Jan Yager... and I love it, so much.
The tiara is the result of Yager's studying the plant life that exists in the area surrounding both her studio and home in Philadelphia, and her translation into of this flora into jewellery. It is modelled after an earlier incarnation called the American Tiara: Invasive Species (2001), which was the designers response to discovering that the weeds she was used to seeing growing in cracks in the sidewalk and vacant lots, and took to native to the USA, were in fact invasive species, pushing out and overgrowing the native flora.
The Tiara of Useful Knowledge (2006), instead of embracing what are invasive plants, instead focused on the ones which, while are often considered nuisance weeds, are in fact historically useful or significant. The tiara features ten species including: ragweed; a potato leaf; clover; crab grass; lamb's quarters; plantain; rye; prickly lettuce and a tobacco blossom (there's also an ant and a pebble representing animal and mineral).
The significance of these plants includes how Native Americans cultivated nearly 3,000 varieties of potato at time of the Spanish Conquest in 1535, but because very few species were brought back to Europe it resulted in a lack of biodiversity. Famously this led to the Great "Irish Potato" Famine (1845-1850) which between the dependency on potatoes within the country and lack of diversity in species which were resistant to potato blight, which lead to Irelands population falling by 20-25% due to death and emigration.
Lamb's Quarter's which is highly resistant to chemical herbicide, also produces a high yield of seed which are able to lie dormant for up to 40 years, and it is often one of the first plants to grow back when soil is disturbed, so in disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, it was reported to be among the first plants to return. The plant is also edible, which makes it even more useful.
Switch Grass grows plentifully in the North American prairies and since the 1980's research has been being done into using this plant as a source of renewable bio-energy, as well as in creation of bio-plastics.
Other plants are sources of food, shelter and enrichment, whereas the one flower, tobacco blossom, is there to represent the allure of a cash crop. Tobacco nets vast amounts of money to the tobacco industry but is not only detrimental to the health of its users, but highly addictive. It's a beautiful flower, which is used toxically.
The meaning behind Yagers tiara is not the only fascinating quality...
Jan Yager || Tiara of Useful Knowledge: City Flora Series (In Parts) || 2006 || Photo by Jack Ramsdale
There is a tradition in history for these pieces of to be transformative. Tiaras being carefully detached from the base headband and then they could be worn as a statement necklace, thus creating duel purpose to a seldom work item of jewellery. Yager's Tiara of Useful Knowledge deconstructs into twelve pieces, including: eight brooches, two stick pins, a tie tack and a pendant, thus making a piece of jeweller - the tiara - which most people would never find a reason to wear, incredible wearable.
Yager sketches cuttings of these plants, dissects them and glues the leaves to sheets of silver or gold, before carefully tracing their outlines with her saw and reassembling them in metal. She uses traditional methods, traditional concepts and imbues weeds with history and hidden meaning, while creating a beautiful of jewellery.
Link || Jan Yager || Wikipedia
Link || Jan Yager || Tiara of Useful Knowledge: City Flora Series (Full Image) via Wikimedia
Link || Jan Yager via Craft in America
Link || Beauty in Weeds and Flotsam by Karl Cole via Davis Art
Elizabeth Lee || Digital Interlude: Blue Haze || 2016 || Digital Acetate, Ink and Sterling Silver
If Maiko Takeda's take on a crown is the embodiment of the corona virus visually, then Elizabeth Lee's design is the NHS and each and every mask wearer.
Lee's "Digital Interlude" collection was her interpretation of the digital veil that surrounds us and was made by colouring digital acetate in RGB (and CMYK) colours. She then cut individual hexagonal pixels into the surface to create an ethereal, iridescent aura around the wearer, which shimmer, blur and distort the wearer behind it.
"The series draws upon the term ‘bokeh’ – an aesthetic blurry quality rendered in a photographic display where parts of the image remain out of focus in response to light."(Elizabeth Lee, Designboom, 2016)
This is illustrated by a brief video the designer posted to Instagram:
It's this beautiful, shimmering interference that I find really wonderful and intriguing about Lee's collection, and how she's taken a flat, relatively everyday material (acetate) and transformed it into something with movement and dimension.
But it's similarity to the face shields we're becoming more and more accustomed to seeing, is also incredibly apparent. It's a headband with an acetate sheet attached, shielding the face. And while practically, full of cut out holes, it would provide no safety between one person to another, it highlights the barrier between the wearer and everyone else. As well as how even with only part of your face covered, suddenly we're not as instantly able to recognise people, even those we know well, when confronted by them.
Link || Elizabeth Lee develops ethereal digital interlude jewellery collection by Elizabeth Lee edited by Hollie Smith via Designboom
Masks and face shields are becoming everyday to us now, perhaps tiaras are next.
Merry Christmas! Day six tomorrow...
Link || Trump Covid post deleted by Facebook and hidden by Twitter, by Marianna Spring via BBC News
Link || Facebook Removes Trump Post on Covid While Twitter Adds Warning by Sarah Frier and Kurt Wagner via Bloomberg
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Listening: you should see me in a crown - Billie Eilish
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