July's selection is rooted in a conviction that jewellery is not ornament but a statement about how one chooses to make things and what one believes matters in the making. Each project here emerges from a distinct philosophy and understands that what a piece looks like cannot be separated from how it's made, where it comes from and what it's meant to carry.
A capsule collection built entirely from recycled silver, honoring Andean heritage and artisan partnership, a practice reinterpreting traditional craft through contemporary art references and material innovation, a collection born from the dialogue between two cities, two approaches, one commitment to the human hand, sculptural, site-specific work that embraces imperfection as evidence of the maker's presence, and a body of work that rewrites the rules of luxury jewellery through technological innovation and genuine gender-neutral design.
This month, we're featuring:
Each project represents a distinct approach to the same question: what does it mean to make jewellery today?
Jakhu Studio. Campaign imagery courtesy of 300nudos.
Founded in 2017 by Maria Bernal, Jakhu Studio operates from the principle that contemporary design and ancestral craft are necessary to each other. The studio works with silversmiths from San Jeronimo de Tunan in the Central Andes, a partnership that shapes every decision about material and method. The name itself is a linguistic bridge: 'Jakhu' means things of value in Aymara; 'Yaku' means water in Quechua.
Jakhu Studio’s pieces respond to Pre-Columbian art and Andean visual language, but they're not costume interpretations – they're made by the communities whose heritage they reference, using methods that honor that heritage as living knowledge, not aesthetic inspiration. Each piece carries what Bernal describes as the artisan's essence – a deep transmission of skill and cultural specificity that can't be mechanized.
matterica. Image © matterica
Matterica means time, hands, and culture – three forces that shape every piece. The studio's recent expansion shows what happens when you take this seriously across different material vocabularies.
The core collection has always emerged from a conviction that jewellery responds to art in all its expressions: fashion, architecture, music, sculpture. There are no boundaries between disciplines in the work – instead, there's a consistent commitment to high-end goldsmithing and the preservation of craft knowledge as something worth defending against industrial replacement.
The recent expansion beyond precious metals into Valencian traditional crafts (ceramics, silk, leathe) deepens this philosophy. Each material brought into the practice carries its history, its own techniques, its cultural weight. Ceramics from Valencia, silk, leather: each arrives with generations of knowledge embedded in how it's made.
GIUNIA. Image © GIUNIA
The studio operates between Amsterdam and Naples, and it's structural to how the work gets made. The practice is rooted in a belief that the work exists between places, and that this tension produces something more considered than either city alone could offer. Naples shapes the visual language: its rawness, its history, its contradictory relationship with time. Amsterdam is where the design happens – precision, clarity, conceptual rigor. The two sensibilities are in constant dialogue.
The recent collections follow recurring themes – nature, a grunge but refined aesthetic, reinterpreted vintage forms. Pieces are handcrafted in Naples using lost-wax casting, in 925 silver, bronze, and recycled leather. But the method of making matters as much as the final form. It begins with a sketch in Amsterdam. The atelier in Naples develops it over days of refinement, with continuous exchange of images and messages between the cities.
Giunia Guerrera’s family is embedded in the production too: her father collaborates on visual storytelling and imagery and her mother oversees production in Naples.
Nike x Emily Frances Barrett. Photo: Maxime de Sadeleer
There's a particular kind of courage required to work entirely intuitively in a field defined by precision and specification. Emily Frances Barrett's sculptural works emerge from the conviction that intuition and material sensitivity can coexist with rigorous artistic thinking.
Working from her East London studio, self-taught, she approaches each project by asking what materials want to be used. Her work moves fluidly between precious metals and stones, but also (and crucially) found and objects: flowers, shells, feathers. Each material enters the conversation on its own terms.
The use of ephemeral organic materials suggests a philosophy about what jewellery is meant to do. These materials are inherently temporal, they change, decay, transform over time – this implies that the pieces aren't meant to be permanent in the traditional sense. They're meant to be worn and to exist in conversation with the wearer's own time.
Emily Frances Barrett designed pieces for David Koma's Spring/Summer 2020 show, creating earrings from butterfly wings and porcupine quills. Her work was featured in The Face magazine when singer Jorja Smith wore her pieces for a shoot. She also customized Nike's Moon Shoe, extending her practice of elevating found and natural materials into collaborative work. She has shown work as part of the Sarabande x JOYCE exhibition in Hong Kong.
SWEETLIMEJUICE – The Interstellar Armour, SS26. Image © SLJ
Simpson Ma developed the stone swaddling method while studying at London College of Fashion, and won the Swarovski Innovator Competition in 2017 for the technique. When he founded SWEETLIMEJUICE in 2019, it became the foundation for the studio’s practice.
The method is straightforward in principle: stones are wrapped and held rather than mounted in traditional settings. This changes how light moves through the piece, and how the relationship between stone and metal becomes visible.
This approach shapes how SWEETLIMEJUICE positions itself. The work doesn't try to be fine jewellery or fashion jewellery, it exists in both registers. Pieces are handcrafted by skilled artisans, but they're also developed with technological precision – there's no tension between those things, they coexist naturally.
The studio designs for everyone: no gendered categories, no assumptions about who wears what, each piece is conceived as something a body might carry.
The studio's recent most ambitious performance piece is the Interstellar Armour, originally created for singer KUN. Handcrafted over two weeks , the piece draws inspiration from celestial constellations and cosmic energy. Intersecting sterling-silver bars trace the hand and arm like veins, forming a protective yet ethereal structure. More than 30 blue and white topazes and quartz stones in varying shades are scattered across the 925 sterling-silver framework, evoking stars suspended in space. Together, the stones and metal form an embroidered sleeve of light.
Explore our curated collection of fashion brands and design practices, or browse previous Projects of the Week.
