The Inception
Hmm, what about office wear? A woman who would love to wear something bold but also something very professional? It’s like they make a statement professionally. The name Empress came around at the later stages but the essence was clear from the beginning.
Why?
It was the beginning of 2020 and I was an Intern Architect working for Urban Frame in Bangalore. The office and the people vibe in there? Encouraging, welcoming.
And the Architects’ dressing? Classy. It would be such a sight to see all the associates, Senior and Junior Architects walk in every morning beaming with confidence. Hmmm, but something seemed missing. And I would say this heavily inspired “Empress”.
I love statement jewelry not to wear but to design. When pondering over the same the idea of “Why don’t we make one ?” struck hard. And I am really glad that thought came by. Because to see something get shaped from scratch, the number of iterations, corrections, trials, mistakes and repeat until the final product is in your hands? It’s way too beautiful than I can ever describe. So that day the sketching began.
“Bold” meant “Mummies” 𓂀 𓁈 𓆣 𓋹 𓀛 𓁀𓀾 𓀮 𓆙
Intuitively to me bold meant Egyptian symbols and patterns. The first attempt looked like an abstract Egyptian-inspired statement piece.
But due to the resource and making limitations, I had to drop this idea and go for something more easy to get made.
The Voronoi fever - RUA
In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects. In the simplest case, these objects are just finitely many points in the plane (called seeds, sites, or generators). For each seed, there is a corresponding region, called a Voronoi cell, consisting of all points of the plane closer to that seed than to any other. The Voronoi diagram of a set of points is dual to that set's Delaunay triangulation.- Wikipedia
At this point, almost all of my parametric explorations were majorly on Voronoi and I felt it would be great to extend this a little further. And thus the Voronoi fever.
The Design
The Making
Ah, how fancy the term “The making” sounds, but the process was not as enticing as it sounded. Laser cut had always been the option from the start, but also figured out CNC was not the best and the cost-efficient way to make these.
After the brass plates were cut into the design it was time to do the “Finishing”
(The pieces are all 14K gold plated).
The Product Teaser
Product Shoot
What’s next ?
Super sincere thanks to all the wonderful people who were a part of this beautiful process- Dr. Harsha, Vikas, Sarathraj, Abijeeth (Talented DOP behind the teaser), Malavika+Sowmya (Who agreed to be my models), and Prasunambika.
For someone who is not inclined to wear statement jewelry, now “The Empress-Rua” is a part of my work life. The moment someone says “That’s a cool piece of jewelry, I say yeah I designed that, Thank you”. 😃