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. Faceted amethyst is placed between the triangles and between the triangles and the pillow beads, deepening the palette and bridging hard geometry with soft luminosity. And against all that structure, 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.