Winter 2020 was, by most reasonable measures, the most domestic Christmas of our adult lives, and the small jewellery houses we love had been quietly building exactly the kind of pieces this season called for. The independent fine jewellers — almost all women-led, almost all working out of small American studios — had spent the year putting out small, considered, gift-able pieces at three different price tiers, and the gift-giving conversation in our friend group spent a lot of December rotating between roughly six brands. Here is the holiday gift edition of our independent-jewellery list, as a complement to the summer post we ran in June.
Foundrae’s holiday medallion edition
Foundrae had been the year’s defining house and Beth Bugdaycay’s holiday merchandising leaned into the brand’s core strength: the medallions, in heavy enamel and 18-karat gold, hanging on weighted clip-extender chains. The house’s Strength Medallion in particular kept selling through the back half of the year. We do not pretend Foundrae is a casual gift purchase — entry-level pieces start in the four figures — but the brand’s positioning as serious-piece-with-meaning suits the year’s mood, and the medallions are the kind of pieces that get passed down. The new Tenacity medallion, released in November, was the seasonal piece our friends with deeper pockets were buying for each other.
Wwake’s gentle gold
Brooklyn-based Wwake, founded by Wing Yau, occupied the gentlest end of the holiday gifting conversation. Yau’s signature is delicate 14-karat gold settings around small, ethically-sourced gemstones — opals, sapphires, diamonds — and the work has the kind of quietness that does not quite read as “luxe” until you sit with it. The opal counter earrings were the gift our friends in their late twenties were buying themselves with the holiday bonus. Yau’s pieces sit at a meaningfully more accessible price point than Foundrae or Anita Ko, and the brand has been ethically transparent about sourcing for years.
Lizzie Fortunato for the costume-fine bridge
Lizzie Fortunato sits in a category we always struggle to name — fine costume, lux costume, semiprecious-statement — and Lizzie and Kathryn Fortunato had been doing some of their best work in 2020. The drop earrings in oversized cabochons of agate and lapis, the heavy chain-link bracelets, the asymmetric multi-stone necklaces had all become the small studio’s most-requested holiday gifts. The pieces are not investment-grade fine jewellery and the sisters do not pretend they are; what they are is well-made, big, and joyful — the kind of statement piece that gives a Zoom call a meaningful element of personality. Most pieces were under five hundred dollars.
Brent Neale’s enamel-and-stone storybook
Brent Neale, working out of a Lower East Side studio, had been steadily climbing the lists of editors who pay attention to fine jewellery, and 2020 was the year she graduated to a wider audience. Neale’s signature is hand-carved gemstones — tourmaline, opal, lapis — set in heavily worked yellow gold, often with playful enamel detailing. The mushroom rings became the breakout, but the heart-shaped pendants, the swirled pinky rings, the cocktail earrings were the December purchases on every single editor’s list we read. Neale’s storybook sensibility — pieces that look like they came out of a beautifully illustrated children’s book, but executed as serious 18-karat fine jewellery — was exactly what the year was calling for.
Azlee for the modernist set
On the opposite end of the visual register from Brent Neale sat Azlee, the LA-based fine jewellery line from Baylee Zwart. Azlee’s pieces are clean, modernist, often architecturally-inspired — small geometries in 18-karat gold, sometimes with a single faceted gemstone for accent. The brand had been building a very particular kind of customer through 2020: women in their thirties and forties who wanted real fine jewellery they could wear every single day for the next twenty years. The thin gold cigar bands, the diamond-set ear cuffs, the single-stone studs in graduated sizes — all of them sold steadily through the back half of the year. Azlee was the answer to “I want one piece that lasts, not five pieces that don’t.”
Luna Skye and the layered-chain refresh
Closing out the list was Luna Skye, the LA studio from Charlie Saidah, which had become the favorite of the Instagram-jewellery customer who wanted layered chains, dainty pavé, and a stack-friendly approach. The brand sat at a more accessible price point than most of the others on this list, and Saidah’s pavé bezel earrings and pendant necklaces had been particular best-sellers through the December gifting cycle. Luna Skye’s positioning — fine jewellery you stack, layer, and wear daily, rather than save for special occasions — fit the year’s mood beautifully.
Six brands, six visual languages, and again the same shared thread we noted in the summer edition: small studios, women-led, made in genuine fine-jewellery quantities, and built for keeping rather than for trend cycles. We will be back in March 2021 with the spring fashion edition. Until then, take care of each other, and treat yourself to something small but considered. Foundrae, Wwake, Lizzie Fortunato, Brent Neale, Azlee, and Luna Skye — six houses to know, and to keep watching, as the small-studio fine-jewellery moment continues into 2021. We are also keeping a close eye on Sophie Buhai’s expanding silver line, on Anita Ko’s recent diamond-hoop range expansion, and on a couple of newer studios — Kinraden in Copenhagen, Loren Stewart out of LA, Marie Lichtenberg out of Paris — that have started showing up consistently on our editor friends’ wishlists.