SNAKE CHARMER
The newest take on Bulgari’s signature Serpenti motif came from an unlikely outsider – with jeweller and designer Yoon Ahn reinterpreting the house icon. By Jen Nurick.
The newest take on Bulgari’s signature Serpenti motif came from jeweller and designer Yoon Ahn, who reinterprets the house icon.
YOON AHN IS recalling her time in Rome, where she travelled to meet Lucia Silvestri, creative director of jewellery at Bulgari, in 2019. Speaking on a Zoom call from Tokyo, where she helms her jewellery and apparel line Ambush, she is transported back to Silvestri’s desk on the Lungotevere Marzio, where the creative director was toying, child-like, with precious gems and stones. “She had all of these crazy stones laid out on her desk and people bringing emeralds and rubies and sapphires the size of your fist,” Ahn remembers. “You would think someone would handle those with so much care and be a little intimidated, but she was picking them up like a toy.”
Silvestri was feeling the stones for their energies. This gutfeel approach left a lasting impression, and helped connect a mutual playfulness at the heart of the Italian heritage house with the Korean-American designer. Raised in Seattle, Ahn is a graduate of Boston University where she studied graphic design and met her partner and co-founder, husband and rapper, Verbal, before segueing into jewellery design, her early pieces worn by Kanye West and Pharrell. Since then, she has worked with brands including Sacai, Nike and Rimowa, developing her singular design methodology by straddling multiple creative worlds at once. An LVMH Prize finalist in 2017, she made her debut as jewellery designer at Dior Homme in 2019. Still, with no formal training, Ahn knows she is an unusual collaborator for a fine jewellery house focused on preserving a legacy of craftsmanship dating back to 1884.
“I think not having a stigma towards fine jewellery helped,” she reflects. “When you approach it academically, you get kind of confined … But because I don’t come from a fine jewellery background, my approach is more: ‘Why not? Why can’t it be this way?’” In order to arrive at her collection of high-vis leather bracelets, bags, cardholders and minaudière, she looked to clothing she owned. Then she identified gaps in her wardrobe – and those of other women she imagined – that needed filling. With an ear to the shifting demands of consumers and bringing her streetwear nous to the fore, she asked herself: “How can I wear these [bags] with my sneakers? Can I walk around with it during the day, or does it have to be an evening bag?”
With versatility a prerequisite, she looked to nature, fixating on the tree pythons from Southeast Asia she discovered on the internet. Their pigmentation and the way they wrapped around trees fascinated Ahn, embodying a loose, relaxed fluidity she’s worked to emulate in her capsule. “I wanted to bring something a little bit softer, something that had a little bit of movement to it,” she says. This sense of motion is realised in plush top-handle and cross-body leather bags, where indents that sink into their shape, then spring back, mimic the curves of a snake. Cloud-like in feel, they achieve the look of a python’s body minus its girth, to capture the Serpenti “in a way that is friendlier, more approachable and more affectionate”, Ahn says. Metal handles on the top-handle bags replicate snakeskin to the touch, while the cross-body’s detachable straps slither through leather inserts that allow it to be styled three ways: around the waist, slung over the shoulder or worn as a clutch.
An element of fun is essential. Ahn says the bags should retain the feel of luxury, but be void of any preciousness. “I always have that in mind, not making things to be held in the museum or kept in the closet,” she says. Her perennial use of neon extends here, though her influences have changed. “It seems very artificial,” she says of the apple-green, fuchsia-pink and sky-blue hues through which the collection’s palette is filtered. “When we started [using neon] it was more a reflection of the man-made environment – Tokyo is a neon city,” she explains. “But this time, as much as this looks artificial and chemical, those are real colours I’ve seen in the snakes, so it came from nature.” Black, white and silver are also included in the mix, which Ahn notes may help uplift customers who might still be in lockdown, even though the collection was designed before the pandemic. “It’s a celebration of beauty in nature and it happened to be that it just kind of makes sense in this climate,” she reflects.
This lighthearted spirit is at the root of Ahn’s design philosophy, which sees her strip jewellery and clothing of identifiers like gender or class, as she believes “it just comes down to that person’s taste or preference”. Ahn finds art, music and travel more relatable categories. Over Zoom, she has customised her screen background – David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash – so the pool in the image matches her T-shirt. The pop art artwork is a fitting choice for a designer who is constantly curating, splicing and pulling from high and low to innovate something new.
“A lot of fashion used to be for a certain demographic, a certain society and class,” she says. “Now we live in a day where customers have more power, and it’s become more democratic.” Her sentiment harks back to Silvestri’s desk, where each stone was considered equally for its ability to radiate a certain mood. Ahn is confident her own accessories will generate a similar effect. “Hopefully that energy can translate to customers when they hold that item, and they just want to hold on to it dearly.”
“Because I don’t come from a fine jewellery background, my approach is more: ‘Why not? Why can’t it be this way?’”