As a follow up to Monday’s post, we’ve found another exciting jewellery designer out of London, Corrie Williamson. Her bold style of graphic, geometric necklaces and bangles caught our eye while shopping on Kabiri, a great online store for emerging, eclectic jewellery designers, including our very own Estelle Dévé.
You may recognise Corrie’s designs, especially if you pay attention to the niche designers showing in the backstreets off London’s fashion schedule. Cooperative Designs, the daring knitwear specialists, commission Corrie to produce, suffice to say, spectacular pieces of object-as-art-as-jewellery with each ready-to-wear season. Corrie and Cooperative Designs are like two design peas in a pod; a joint force since their graduate days at Central St. Martins.
Much like the label, Corrie’s jewellery is all about bringing together unusual techniques and materials in a very playful, offbeat manner. Interestingly enough, Corrie’s jewellery career kickstarted with sales in Japan. For men. “The pieces that I was originally making were never intentionally designed for men, but I do think that gender plays an important role in my design work in general [because] my approach to jewellery is one that pushes [gender] roles. I love my jewellery to be worn by both men and women and the blurred edges of gender are what interests me a great deal“.
Corrie’s approach to jewellery is kind of like carpentry. “ I use traditional woodwork machinery and tools and combine woods and perspex with traditional metals. I [like to] to combine [these with] things from a hardware store, like rivets and hinges”. A mix of psuedo-industrial and natural desires. The result is a distinctive display of strong colours and textures, a complement to Cooperative’s optical appeal.
So the question begs, does the approach to design differ when designing for her own range? “I love collaborating with other designers. Sometimes it can be quite solitary work, especially when working freelance. It is definitely different to the way I approach my own collection because it comes from a much more fashion/trend direction. Themes are drawn from and adapted and put together to make a collection [like for Cooperative Designs] but with my own collection I am much more materials based. I’m interested in putting together interesting and contrasting materials without the structure of a ‘theme”.
Collaborations are very much de rigour in fashion these days, and certainly something that keeps Corrie busy. Separate to her work with Cooperative, Corrie partners with sustainable fashion company GoodOne, who offer an ethical, body-hugging collections made from technicoloured, recycled materials. Corrie works on “producing belt buckles that are an integral part of the garment”, naturally all made from sustainable materials, “And of course, I’m working on my own collection…”.
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