Jenia Kim, the namesake pressure behind the Tashkent, Uzbekistan-based trend label J.Kim, and Natalia Bryantseva, the founding father of Berlin-based jewelry model Avgvst, have been each born and raised within the former Soviet Union, Kim in Tashkent and Bryantseva in Russia.
The pair, who met almost a decade in the past, additionally shares a household historical past marked by displacement and resilience. Bryantseva’s household was persecuted by Soviet authorities within the Nineteen Thirties and exiled to Kazakhstan, whereas Kim’s household is a part of the Koryo-saram group of 172,000 ethnic Koreans who have been exiled to Central Asia by Joseph Stalin in 1937.
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Avgvst X J.Kim Tube Flip Stud in Yellow Gold
This spring, J.Kim and Avgvst merged their aesthetics and cultural histories for a jewelry assortment rooted in craftsmanship and cultural reminiscence. ‘For Avgvst, the impulse to collaborate all the time comes from admiration for the collaborator’s artistic thoughts, and from an ongoing sense of mutual respect and friendship,’ defined Bryantseva. ‘We’ve all the time wished to experiment with jewelry, and we had tried earlier than, however technically, it’s fairly advanced,’ added Kim. ‘Avgvst has a really robust skilled method and high quality on this area.’
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Avgvst X J.Kim Baking Cup Earrings Gold Vermeil
Constructed in white gold, yellow gold, and gold vermeil, the Avgvst x J.Kim assortment is constructed round three concepts that evoke a way of heat, heritage, and cultural identification: ‘The Baking Cup’, reimagined as earrings, recollects the pair’s grandmothers’ serving baked items recent from the oven; ‘The Tubes’, a up to date tackle conventional Uzbek jewelry, hyperlinks tubular varieties to peridot, garnet, and topaz gem stones; and ‘The Embrace’, flat, floral-shaped motifs resembling cookie-cutter varieties, designed to ‘hug’ the wearer’s earlobe or wrist. ‘Aesthetically, it’s all the time about balancing the heat and ornamental richness that exists in Uzbek tradition with the readability and purity of type that comes from Korean tradition,’ mentioned Kim, whose items are within the V&A everlasting assortment.
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Avgvst X J.Kim Tube Ring
To entrance the Avgvst x J.Kim marketing campaign, Bryantseva and Kim chosen New York-based author and baker Lexie Smith, who, by her analysis venture Bread on Earth, investigates how bread acts as a social, political, financial, and ecological barometer. ‘She represents concepts which might be vital to us – household, craft, dedication to a follow and bringing it to a degree of mastery,’ mentioned Kim. ‘She lives inside the precise territory this collaboration is attempting to honour: gradual craft, repetition, endurance, and the concept on a regular basis work can carry actual cultural weight,’ added Bryantseva.
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Avgvst X J.Kim Embrace Bracelet
Like her household within the Nineteen Thirties, Bryantseva additionally left her house in Russia to start out a brand new life in Berlin. ‘Folks like us – people who find themselves displaced, dwelling away from our personal land – attempt to bear in mind, reconstruct, and restore a way of the place we come from, of our roots,’ mentioned Bryantseva. ‘I maintain my grandmother’s recipe guide and bake cookies for my daughter from it. I learn that pocket book and bear in mind the odor of her meals. That’s what holds me proper now.’
‘I feel the concept of consolation could be very central,’ mentioned Kim. ‘In a world that usually feels overwhelming, there’s a must return to one thing extra important – to create a way of stability by easy, human actions, like making one thing together with your fingers in your family members.’
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Avgvst X J.Kim Pierced Embrace Earrings
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Avgvst X J.Kim Rolled-Out C-Earrings Gold Vermeil
