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Jewelry designer seeks inspiration from the wearer
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FOR Omar Torres, creative director of jewelry brand ENZO, jewelry design is like a mirror. It reflects the relationships between objects, the wearer and society.
“Jewelry should impart meaning to the world as it is a part of society and culture,” Torres said.
The former architect was in Shanghai this week to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the brand’s launch on the Chinese mainland.
He said creativity, wearability and the use of color are what concerns him the most when designing jewelry.
“Jewelry should be something we put on ourselves in order to complete and express ourselves, especially color because color creates more states of mind. It is something we feel unconsciously before we bring it forth consciously,” he said.
He talks with Shanghai Daily.
Q: You bring a lot of architectural ideas into design. Why?
A: Jewelry design is the equivalent of what an architect does. Jewelry design is not influenced by ability, per say, by the thinking process of developing a three-dimensional object. It has to be practical. If you are going to make a thing that becomes uncomfortable between fingers, it is not paying attention to anatomy... And this is the thing that 99 percent of jewelry designers never think about. How is this object going to sit on the body? How is an earring is going to relate to this tiny little piece of flesh, and relate to the jawbone, cheekbone, neckline and hair? In other words, most people design this object for itself, not like an architect going for context. And the context for jewelry is the body.
Q: Tell us about your inspiration.
A: The inspiration comes from the wearer. Like an architect, before he designs the building, he analyzes the context. So I start from the context, which is the result and start backwards from the end. We have to make things for a certain price, so you need parameters. And continue to narrow this down. In terms of anatomy, what is the volume of this thing. Is it flat? Geometric? Round? Curved?
Q: What trend do you foresee in jewelry design?
A: Jewelry has something related to the wearer, but also to the times. A piece of jewelry from 17th-century Paris is very different from 20th-century jewelry from Naples in Italy. The point of view was different, their attitudes toward life were different. Germany, for example, their characters are more serious and subdued. As to Naples they are more open, they would wear this big coral necklace. Germans, instead, they wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it. So all these cultural things affect what people do. Jewelry creation is a reflection of the person who creates it, the time and place in which they live, the culture.
Q: Men’s jewelry is becoming more popular. Will you add that into ENZO’s future collections?
A: At one point in history, men wore more jewelry than women. If you look at some European paintings from the 1500s, those men wore very ornate things, very amazing. And women were much more subdued.
It was more a men’s thing because kings and princes around the world, like Henry VIII in England, they had more rings than any young girl today.
As the 1700s came about, the industrial revolution changed society as it was no longer ruled by kings and princes but these new entrepreneurs, the new bourgeois, working class who created business and made money... That began to affect what a man wore. So if you look at a painting of a man in the 1700s and 1800s, they were dressing either dark, grey or black suit.
Eventually in the 1960s there was this reaction of young men against the establishment, the older generation. They began to wear beads, leather, bracelets and necklaces, and pierce the ears. Young men began to liberate and express themselves physically.
In the 1980s the hippie generation was marginalized, and jewelry disappeared again for men until it began to be worn by the gay community.
So there was a direct relationship between a man wearing jewelry and his sexual preferences.
Only in the last 10 to 15 years has it come back and it is accepted only because a big football player, 300 pounds, 6 foot 5, would wear a stud earring, or a famous guy like David Beckham would wear a leather core with a pendant.
So they became icons of self-expression that said to other men it’s OK to wear things. So yes, ENZO is thinking about what jewelry can be for men today.
Q: What do you think makes a successful design?
A: The best design is the one that’s coherent in which the materials are used in a proper way with the cost factor, the manufacturing ability has been considered, you make the best use of the material you had, and when the use of the material really compliments the wearer. When all these things happen properly, the object is coherent whether people like it or not.
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