Of all the jewelry trends that have struck a chord with consumers since the start of the pandemic, jewels in the form of letters and words have become utterly ubiquitous.
“There’s no historical precedent for the amount of typography we’re seeing in jewelry,” Marion Fasel, a jewelry historian, author and the founder of the online jewelry publication the Adventurine, said in early June at a fine jewelry show in Las Vegas, where sculpted letter jewels seemed to glimmer from every showcase. “It’s astonishing how many people are doing the alphabet. It’s almost required now, as much as a zodiac.”
Contemporary designers certainly aren’t the first jewelers to incorporate letters into their work. For an early example of typographical jewelry style, look to ancient Egypt and the dawn of the signet ring, when engraved family symbols and, later, initials were used with sealing wax to authenticate documents.
The Victorians — who “were obsessed with symbolism,” said Bill Rau, the third-generation owner of M.S. Rau, an antiques dealer in New Orleans — carried on the tradition, creating elaborate monogram brooches and lockets with intertwined initials. And they set the stage for what arguably has been the 20th century’s most famous word jewel: the gold “Carrie” nameplate necklace worn by Sarah Jessica Parker’s character in “Sex and the City.”
“Letters are signifiers of meaning,” said Sara Soskolne, a creative type director at Monotype Studio, a design firm in New York. “You see a letter and you know it stands for something else. It’s like an abstract symbol that means something beyond its form. And I think that may be why people find them profound or beautiful.”
But with the recent popularity of letter and word jewels, which trend experts have attributed to a continuing increase in demand for personalized styles, some jewelers are now finding ways to make their typographical designs stand out, creating custom lettering that reflects their personal, often quirky, tastes.
Here is a closer look at five recent collections that give new meaning to the term “statement jewelry.”
Itä Jewelry
Inés Capó, a native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, grew up visiting relatives in San Sebastián, a coastal city in Spain’s Basque Country. One of the many things that the self-described “font nerd” loves about the region is what she called its “national typography.”
“You see it in bars, on signage, you see it all over,” Ms. Capó said. “It has this very Gothic look — it’s very mysterious.” Basque lettering originated in the Middle Ages, but it was revived in the 1930s when a book about ancient Basque monuments inspired numerous variations of the distinctive, largely uppercase letters.
Ms. Capó and her best friend, Afet Burcu Salargil of Istanbul, were laying the groundwork for Itä, their fine jewelry brand, when she returned to San Sebastián in 2018 for a short stay. “That’s where I decided we were going to make a coquí, which is the little frog that’s in Puerto Rico,” for the 2019 debut collection, Ms. Capo said. “And really, a lot of the ideation happened in San Sebastián. So I hold it close to my heart.” (The brand now has a design studio in San Juan and production operations in Istanbul.)
Last year, Itä introduced its Sanse collection of 14-karat gold and diamond letter pendants and charms, which range from $475 to $2,600. The line, called by a San Sebastián nickname, reinterprets the Basque typography that seduced Ms. Capó.
“We had always wanted to do initials,” Ms. Capó said. “I had always gravitated to this Basque typography, but I wasn’t sure if it would translate into gold or on a necklace. We spent almost two years perfecting it, taking different letters and styles from different typography foundries, and playing with each one.”
One way Ms. Capó and Ms. Salargil made the letters their own was by giving them a hint of movement. “When you think of Turkey, you think of whirling dervishes and Ottoman swirls, and being in the Caribbean, there’s that love of water,” Ms. Capó said. “That’s why we wanted to make sure that the letters didn’t feel bulky, that they felt like they were dancing.”
CRZM by Mociun
In 2019, Caitlin Mociun, a fine jewelry designer in Brooklyn, decided to create a collection of letter jewels. “But I wanted it to be different,” Ms. Mociun said. “So I did sign language letters. I had someone hand carve teeny tiny hands. But I just discontinued them. People didn’t get it because it’s not an obvious letter, so it didn’t really register.”
CRZM by Mociun, an accessibly priced sibling brand that Ms. Mociun introduced last year (the initials represent her full name, Caitlin Ruth Zoe Mociun), is her attempt to try again. The collection, which comes in silver and gold, features an alphabet of letter charms that Ms. Mociun sculpted from polymer clay over two successive evenings.
“It’s all based on kind of a snake shape,” she said, “like a long coil or a piece of spaghetti.”
There was some trial and error in the clay-modeling process. “I probably made five of each letter,” she said. “I have an entire box of all the discarded letters. The ‘J’ I did in cursive. And then I was like, ‘This is bad.’ So I went back and did the ‘J’ later, and it’s my favorite letter now.”
The CRZM charms come in three sizes: mini, medium and large. In silver, they range from $320 to $500.
“The large size is an inch and a half tall — you couldn’t hang it off an earring,” Ms. Mociun said.
Renato Cipullo
Shortly after Renato Cipullo emigrated to New York City in 1971, the Italian jewelry designer made his first attempt at the typography trend by designing a silver and gold belt buckle featuring his own initials.
For a twist, however, he designed the letters in reverse (“So,” he said, “when I looked in the mirror, I could read them”). He also made a yellow gold chain composed of links sculpted in the form of letters, a predecessor of the 18-karat gold Lettera chains he now offers.
The following year Mr. Cipullo’s aunt requested gold earrings with her initials, G.C., so he made a pair that stacked the G atop the C, using a distinctive font style that he had modeled in silver: bold and blocky yet curved at the corners.
“You could put it on a gold chain, on a rope or on a silk necklace,” he recalled. “It could be casual or very elegant.”
A few years ago, Mr. Cipullo’s daughter Serena stumbled on a photo of a relative wearing the G.C. initials, but transformed into a pendant. Ms. Cipullo, who joined the brand in 2017 as its managing director, suggested recreating the initials, but as single-letter pendants. In 2023 the Cipullos introduced the result, the Splendente line; each pendant is $7,950.
“When we first came out with the letters, they weren’t such a trend the way they are now,” Ms. Cipullo said. But both father and daughter agreed that the letters have unexpectedly become the brand’s calling card.
AnaKatarina Design
When Ana-Katarina Vinkler‑Petrovic, the founder and creative director of AnaKatarina Design in Boston, conceived her new 18-karat gold letter pendants, she was channeling Ibiza in the mid-1970s.
“White bell bottoms, a little bandanna, long necklaces, lots of gold,” Ms. Vinkler‑Petrovic said. “You’re feminine, but you’ve got your female empowerment. Initial pendants are part of that.”
The designer, who worked with her 27-year-old daughter Adrina on the collection, used negative space to create the letter silhouettes, housed inside square gold frames surrounded by tiny gold spikes.
“We were talking about kids and childhood, and then we thought, ‘The toy block is a really nice idea,’” she said. “We added the spikes, which are my signature. It’s a little bit of attitude, not abrasive, just empowered.”
The designs, introduced in May at $3,155 to $5,450, reflected the influence of her father, an architect who worked for the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. She said she planned to add gemstones in their next iteration, as a nod to her mother, an abstract painter.
“When I sit with my work, there’s always a tension between rectilinear architectural forms and then color, depth, movement,” she said. “It’s like my parents play this really lovely tune in my head. My father is the frame of the music, and my mother is the color.”
Engelbert
Early in her career, Giovanna Engelbert, the global creative director of Swarovski’s crystal business, was the editor of the Italian luxury jewelry magazine Vogue Gioiello (Vogue Jewelry).
“I always had this thing about writing something in jewelry,” Ms. Engelbert said on a video call in late May from her home in Stockholm. (In 2016 the Milan native married Oscar Engelbert; the couple are now the co-owners of the Swedish jewelry house Engelbert.)
The time to fulfill that wish came in 2023, after the birth of her second child. “I wanted to give myself a present: two cuffs with my children’s names on them,” Ms. Engelbert said.
She rendered their names in her own handwriting, a voluptuous script with large curling forms. “If I was a painter, I would be the opposite of a Cubist,” Ms. Engelbert said. “I would be like a ‘circlist.’ I like the roundness, the curves.” The Engelbert workshops copied her writing in engraving the names, setting diamonds into the engraving channels so it looks as if the names had been written in gems.
When she began wearing the 18-karat gold Wonder Woman-esque bracelets, the bold accessories caught the attention of friends and friends of friends, and slowly, Engelbert began to accept custom orders.
The custom Name Cuffs, featuring names engraved from Ms. Engelbert’s elegant cursive and set with diamonds, are available in small, medium and large sizes. They start at $49,500.
In an Instagram post in April, Ms. Engelbert explained the cuffs’s appeal: “Sometimes, love is best spelled out in diamonds.”
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