How to be beautiful on the inside, too
To say that Pippa Small inspires devotion is an understatement. She’s been a beacon for lovers of deceptively sophisticated, bohemian jewellery for years. Before she opened a boutique in Notting Hill, west London (and started being stocked in Barneys, Net-A-Porter.com and matchesfashion.com, as well as having a permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian in Washington), connoisseurs would pass her name among themselves, before making the pilgrimage to her brightly painted, lavishly kelim-ed flat, where she’d pull out baskets of fabulously colourful jewellery from under beds and delve into Indonesian chests for packets of raw, uncut Indian diamonds.
Two decades on, those women are still wearing their Pippa Small jewels – though never quite as magnificently as the 6ft tall, flamboyantly maned Small herself does – because it has never gone out of style.
A seamless blend of ethnic, ancient and contemporary, set off with precious and semiprecious stones in lambent shades of chartreuse, raspberry and forget-me-not blue, Small’s jewellery is unquestionably dazzling without being vulgar.
Besides spawning a new jewellery vernacular, Small is properly altruistic and brave – although, being properly altruistic and brave, she’d never mention it herself. I’m not talking about fashion courage either, which is wearing last year’s Prada to meet Anna Wintour, or mismatching yellow and puce. The bravery on display every day in the workshops in Kabul – where Small’s Turquoise Mountain range (as distinct from her main line) is produced – is the real deal. It’s here, over the past 10 years, that Small has trained a small but growing band of women to sketch designs and bring their templates alive. “It’s so unusual in Asia, let alone Kabul, for women to make jewellery,” says Small. “But at Turquoise Mountain, they’re engaged in the silversmithery, as well as the gem cutting.” These are women who would otherwise be confined to their homes. As it is, they risk their lives by going to the workshop – there are plenty in Kabul who’d like to see women deprived of all freedoms. Despite this, Small says, it’s an uplifting place to be. The situation in Kabul may have deteriorated dramatically since the allied troops finally withdrew in 2014, but in the workshop all is lightness, albeit tempered with quiet concentration.
“It is remarkable how the atmosphere has changed. In the beginning, the women were clearly afraid and wouldn’t make eye-contact. Now they joke around with the men (the workshop is not genderbiased in its training). There’s Bollywood music playing and a lot of teasing, especially when the men try on the jewellery.”
These are not discreet manjewels but, like Small’s costlier solo line, ebullient, slabs of colour. The new collection features navy lapis lazuli and chrysocolla (sourced from Bamiyan, where the Taliban blew up two monumental, 6th-century Buddhas in 2001) framed in organic-looking whorls of gold-plated silver.
The workshop is a sanctuary – creatively, culturally, economically. With the departure of troops, foreign attachés and NGOs, Kabul’s income is on its knees. For over a decade, Chicken Street thrived as locals went shopping for presents. “Now,” notes Small, “it’s deserted. Crafts that used to sell for $100 now fetch $5. Demand has dried up. The few foreigners still there are helicoptered from the airport to their compounds and are not allowed out. The other challenge is the locals – even when they have money, they’re in thrall to Western goods. We need to show them that Afghan craft has worth – it has centuries of tradition.”
Small visits several times a year, wrapping herself in a veil to step from the car that takes her from the airport to central Kabul. She’s also set up similar projects in Burma, Bolivia and Panama. Not that she’s some fearless Kamikaze warrior. What emerges, after we’ve been talking for a while, is that the Kabul trips fill her with trepidation – after all, she is the mother of four-year-old twins. But she clearly feels a ferocious responsibility to sustain the project that now employs 15 women and 25 men. Luckily, the collection is lovely. Inside and out.