Lito Karakostanoglou loves artisanal skills, travel and collecting unusual items — passions that shaped her fine jewelry brand, Lito, which has been celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
And all those interests are showcased in her Cabinet of Curiosities boutique in the Kolonaki neighborhood of Athens. “I named it Cabinet of Curiosities since, through my travels, I bring back various treasures and gems that I collect and sell,” Ms. Karakostanoglou said, such as the antique coral carved to look like fish she stumbled across in Cairo and used in some diamond-embellished designs.
But Ms. Karakostanoglou, a self-taught jeweler, acknowledged that her enamel evil eye jewelry, introduced 15 years ago, “made us — it’s our most well-known.”
She commissions artists to create the hyper-realistic eyes seen on the bracelets, necklaces, earrings and rings finished at her atelier in Monastiraki, Athens’s jewelry district, where most of her 22 employees work.
The eyes also were the focus of an anniversary collection, accented with pearls and precious stones such as diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and spinels. “I wanted to reinterpret the eye to find new ways to design around it,” she said. “And this time, I felt that I really wanted to be as celebratory and bold as possible.”
L’Amour Céleste, for example, featured an enamel eye pendant surrounded by sapphires and white brilliant-cut diamonds and hung on an 18-karat gold chain. Engraved on the back was the phrase “Sous la grande des puissances célestes,” which Ms. Karakostanoglou translated as “under the protection of the celestial powers.” (15,300 euros, $17,780).
And the L’Amour Perlé brooch (€12,200), a 3.14-inch-wide enamel eye topped with pearls, was engraved on the back: “Perles lunaires tissant ton destin sous l’éclat de la lune” (in English, “Moon pearls weaving your destiny beneath the moon’s glow”).
Following the collection’s September debut, Lito staged a two-day trunk show for it in mid-October at the Beirut boutique of the Lebanese jewelry dealer Sylvie Saliba.
“My Lebanese clients love these unique pieces,” Ms. Saliba said during a recent phone interview. “They are very modern and versatile, very easy to style, and they’re one-of-a-kind.” Ms. Saliba said she had been selling Lito designs since 2017, adding that the evil eye motif is very popular there because the Lebanese consider it to be a powerful talisman.
In addition to the Lito website and Ms. Saliba’s boutique, Ms. Karakostanoglou sells her work, which ranges from €600 to €57,000, through about 20 stockists, including the By Marie jewelry chain in France and the Beatriz Werebe stores in Brazil.
It was during her graduate studies at Emerson College in Boston that Ms. Karakostanoglou started experimenting with jewelry and selling it to friends.
When she returned to Athens in 1998, she made jewelry in the studio occupied by her sister Nikomachi Karakostanoglou, a visual artist and sculptor, until she opened her current premises in Kolonaki the following year. (Lito’s V.I.P. customer lounge on the floor above the boutique now displays one of Nikomachi’s latest creations: a silk carpet that is part of the Art Rug Projects initiative by the carpet weaving company Soutzoglou, hanging on the wall.)
Travel also helped to inform Lito’s new 14-piece collection called Cosmic Guardians, which Ms. Karakostanoglou plans to introduce Dec. 17.
She used a scarab beetle from Deyrolle, a well-known taxidermy gallery and scientific institution in Paris, for a charm bracelet in 2008. And saying that she wanted to make each of her clients feel “like a modern-day Cleopatra,” she returned there to get preserved beetles for a limited-edition run of one-of-a-kind designs (prices on application).
Ms. Karakostanoglou said two of her most skilled artisans worked on the insects, gently removing their interiors and injecting a resin-like preparation to harden their fragile bodies so they could be handled more easily. “You hold it a lot, as you try to shape gold around its body,” she said, such as when augmenting an edge or its underside.
“When I decided to launch the collection, this was the first piece I designed,” she said, referring to an ornate pair of earrings featuring green Torynorrhina flammea beetles from Thailand, their heads and bodies set with trillion-, baguette- and round-cut white diamonds. “They are the biggest earrings, the strongest in terms of expressing the power of the scarab.”
She also augmented a metallic red Chrysina aurigans beetle from Costa Rica with exaggerated, articulated gold legs and hung it from a chunky 1960s-era 18-karat gold necklace. And her drop earrings mixed green Chrysochroa fulminans beetles from Indonesia, orange spessartites and delicate gold fringe.
Each client who buys one of what Ms. Karakostanoglou called her “collectible art pieces” will be given documentation about the Latin name and geographic origin of the species it features, as well as what she described as a kind of habitat — a matte white porcelain stand by Diana Alexander, a sculptor in Athens.
The idea, Ms. Karakostanoglou said, is for the scarab jewelry to be displayed like a sculpture, so it can be appreciated when not worn. And when it is worn, she added, “the porcelain piece is so beautiful that it can stand alone.”
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