Source: Maya Villiger/Turned Out wearing BRVTVS portia bracelet
Remember those days when you used to sit around on porches and make friendship bracelets? You used to get those precious, jewel-like threads, tape them down onto some hard surface, and weave and tuck and generally make a mess of the whole thing until a fully woven strip of fabric would emerge, triumphant, and you would hand it over to your "best friend" with such vehement pride? I used to get friendship bracelet-making kits for my birthday every year, and I used to weave (or really, plait, because I was hopeless at all the elaborate designs made) my little heart out. Those were simpler days, right?
Caroline Ventura makes the kind of friendship bracelets that my 9 year old self would have turned her nose up at (too fussy, too gold), but my 19 year old self is obsessing over. Her label BRVTVS has a whole Roman theme going on - get it? Brutus? The master of betrayal now promoting friendship? Anyone else think that's really funny? Just me? okay, moving on - that comes through not just in the name for her dainty, delicate little necklaces and jewellery (think Calpurnia bracelets and Pompey necklaces) but also in the style. Caroline makes pieces that are so delicate and intricate. Her pieces are all so simple, but striking in the way that good jewellery is.You are stunned not by flashy jewels or settings, but rather the quality of metals, that rosy-sheen of the gold, the way that a bracelet can swoop around the classic curve of the wrist. There are no bells and whistles, just easy chains with a small pendant or a tiny bead. But imagine that, resting lightly on a freckled arm or poking out from a comfy sweatshirt? Can't you see those gold chains stacked up or by themselves, just draping along the lines of an Acne silk shirt in pistachio green? This kind of jewellery is the kind that restores my faith in an industry saturated with fake metal, resins and alloys. Caroline uses only 14k gold and - in her reincarnation of the friendship bracelet, hand dyed silk - that results in jewellery that practically sings with natural beauty. I guess I'm the girl who always preferred rough cut quartz and freshwater pearls.
I always warm quickly to designers who say that the reason they started the line was to fill a void that they identified as lacking. Isabel Marant with her need for simple, easy-going Paris chic, Phoebe Philo and her desire for a working woman's minimalist armour, and now Caroline Ventura, who says she designs jewellery she wants to wear. Her, and every other girl, including myself. She said that perhaps history might have been different if Caesar had given Brutus a friendship bracelet. I used to think that nothing is ever that simple, but after seeing these bracelets, I might have to change my mind.
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