Zelda

For the woman who loves the tension between wildness and discipline.

Zelda is named for Zelda Fitzgerald: dancer, painter, writer, and one of the most passionately alive women of the Jazz Age. She trained obsessively at the barre, loved with operatic intensity, and burned with a creative fire the world around her could not quite contain — until, finally, it couldn't. She died in a fire at the institution where she spent her final years.

The design holds three truths at once. The gold triangle frames — precise, architectural, geometric — echo the discipline of the barre, the ballerina on pointe. At their center, brick-red enamel burns — the fire that consumed her, metaphorically and literally. And against all that hard geometry, the dark purple lampwork glass pillow beads carry her other self: soft, luminous, creatively alive, vulnerable. Modern gold rondelles give the piece its polished backbone.

The triangle components were discovered at an estate sale while I was sketching this collection — part of a different necklace, a different life, reborn here as if guided by Zelda’s own words: “Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.”

Materials: Dark purple lampwork glass pillow beads · Faceted amethyst · Brick-red enamel triangles set in gold geometric frames (estate-sourced, reinterpreted) · Modern gold rondelles · 18k gold-plated sterling silver findings

A tribute to a singular age — and the untameable women who made it.