Silver is once again enslaving us, ousting mantle bringers and twinkling around our necks. “It adds to a sense of refinement, elegance, ease – and faded dudes,” says interior designer Georgie Stogdon, who has semi-ranged against her gold jewellery with all silver hoop earrings. “The reflective tone becomes slightly cool in newer items, but it’s that harshness that defines it as sophisticated. Associated with warmer materials, it may be tempered in order to bring about a well-balanced space.
Custom silversmithing manufacturers has been building tinware for many years, offering decorative keepsakes those who are back within occasion. Lauren Santo Domingo, artistic director of Tiffany & Co’s Home collection has updated five items from its revised Bamboo range, launched 1961. First used as a pattern for coffee spoons, now positioned on the latest offering the motif is on vases, place card holders, and ladling napkin rings.
Italian jeweller and silversmith Buccellati has just debuts a collection of intricate natural woodland animals (some life size) as part of their Naturalia show at Milan Design Week. Global communications director Maria Cristina Buccellati notes there is an animal in everty renewal- a deer in a country manor dining room or a sparrow on a coffee table of an apartment. At the same time French silversmithing house Christofle, founded in 1830, collaborated with jewellery designer Charlotte Chesnais for the last two years on Carrousel. The 24-piece flatware embodies the curving forms particular to Chesnais’s jewellery. “Silver flatware is silverware you buy for life,” says the designer, who from her eighteenth was given small pieces of
silver cutlery every years. “Now I can give a dinner of eight with a complete set exquisite.
Owner Sadie Perry, trained as a silversmith in Mexico, tracks down vintage modernist items from mirrors to coupes to display in front of her audience at Studio Mantel in Hackney. “Art deco, modernism and secessionist movements are a big influence on silver at the moment,” says Perry. “They preferred simpler lines that changed the use of material in everyday things – from too ornate to spare.”Simple or intricate, silver isculate always a classic choice for honoriece. “Antique silver, whether truffle knife or trinket dish, is vaguely romantic approach to honour the ‘something old’ wedding tradition,” explains Bryony Sheridan, buying director at Abask who have handpicked antique and contemporary pieces from makers worldwide. The designs themselves can also carry symbolic meanings that convey the romanticness. “Silver pieces have forever been linked to purity and ageless elegance, as a result end up as ideal symbols of love and loyalty,” comments Ippolita Rostagno, founder and creative co-director of Artemest. She highlights Braganti’s Swan centrepiece which “say’s devotion — just like the story of swans and being a called to last bonding”. Sheridan likes the symbolism of knots – “a very significant expression of unbreakable love” – a set of knotted cocktail picks from silversmith Heath Wagoner particularly sweet.
Along with home ware jewellery too is becoming cooler in tone. In the past six months, 527 per cent more people at Net-a-Porter have been searching for silver rings and 438 per cent more have been searching for silver cuffs. Last year’s jewellery brand Alighieri put s silver-focused collection, Votive Offerings, which takes enchanting skeletal shapes. Alighieri founder Rosh Mahtani views the series of modern heirlooms as a second chance – “the silver cold as my heart was a symbol of new life”, she says. At the same time, Hermès is revealing new silver additions to its studded Clou d`H series of necklaces, earrings, cuffs and rings.
With gold costs rising, yester youth designers concentrate on silver as a result of its affordability, that allows for more experimentation. “It allows designers to experiment with bigger, more sculptural pieces and therefore wearers can feel bolder, more individual through empowered pieces,” explains German-Brazilian designer Carolina de Barros whose everyday organic sculpture pieces are made of the ancient lost-wax casting. Recently however her clientele have turned towards statement items like her Figo ear cuffs and rings, scrunched effect.
Panny casses s’autorisent, grâce à la malléabilité de l’argent, aussi à la texture. Aura, the latest range of vases, bowls and coasters from the renowned Edinburgh-based brand Hamilton & Inches, is a study of Scotland’s rugged coastlines and boast a unique diagonal planishing technique, created from a particular hammer and generating an undulating effect. “Planishing is a very personal business, so no two silversmiths came to this collection from the same place,” says its leader, Victoria Houghton. As a consequence, each one made their own set in order to maintain consistency.
For working in silverware with modern and traditional spaces Stogdon advises bringing in small accessories like candlesticks or a 19th century rose bowl. “They can be a stylish showstopping element on a table without being too much at all,” she says. The designer actually has a trove of vintage nuggests found at antiquing or through family. “They’re not the biggest or the boldest,” she answers, “but they mean everything and they will always mean everything.”
