Anabela Chan

Anabela Chan

Anabela Chan was born in Hong Kong, trained as an architect at the Bartlett and worked at Richard Rogers' practice, including on the Ground Zero project, before spending years as a print and embroidery designer for Alexander McQueen. She went back to study at the Royal College of Art, graduated in 2013, and launched a fine-jewellery house built on laboratory-grown gemstones and recycled metals.

Jewelry

Chan was the first independent fine-jewellery designer to build a whole brand around lab-grown stones set in recycled metal, which in 2013 was a commercially risky position rather than a marketing angle. Selfridges, The Conran Shop and Luisa Via Roma picked her up straight out of the RCA graduate show. She had already taken a Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council award in 2012 for a brooch called Cyclamen, and added a diamond-grading qualification from Gem-A along the way.

Our honest take

The material experiments are the real signature: the 2020 Blooms collection turned recycled soda-can aluminium into fine jewellery, and later work has used ocean-waste metals and regeneratively cultivated Tahitian pearls. The red-carpet record is genuinely deep, from Zoë Kravitz's custom earrings at the 2019 Met Gala to Lizzo and Hari Nef in 2024, and she was named to Walpole's fifty most influential people in British luxury in 2022. Buy the sculptural nature motifs, where the architecture training shows.