Before her passing this March, legendary architect Zaha Hadid had collaborated with everyone from Pharrell Williams for Adidas to United Nude, Swarovski, Caspita, Melissa Shoes, B&B Italia, and many, many more. Her final collaboration? A stunning set of jewelry created in collaboration with Georg Jensen featuring five rings and three cuff bracelets set in black rhodium and sterling silver and set with black diamonds. The jewelry, of course, resembles Hadid’s striking vision that was so evident in many of her architectural creations. Jensen himself, who passed away in the ’30s, viewed jewelry, art, sculpture, and architecture as a single expression. In fact, many jewelers either start out as architects or sculptors or flipped between those two mediums and jewelry design (Robert Lee Morris, David Yurman, Alexander Calder, and Ettore Sottsass, to name a few).
“Working with Georg Jensen presented an opportunity to express our ideas in different scales and through different media. Our starting point was the many links to nature at Georg Jensen,” said Hadid in a press statement made before her death. “There is an inherent integrity within the organic structural logic found in nature, and we often look at the coherence of natural systems when we work to create environments. Our challenge was to translate that into something that can be worn; to reinterpret the rich history and tradition of the Georg Jensen design approach into something new.” This important final collaboration not only honors Hadid’s memory, but also commemorates a century of artist collaborations for Georg Jensen.
