Nak Armstrong

Nak Armstrong

Nak Armstrong trained as an architect at the University of Texas before a detour into New York fashion led him back to Austin, where a textile company he ran with a partner pivoted into jewelry by the late 1990s under the name Anthony Nak. After that partnership ended around 2009, Armstrong spent two years developing a new direction and launched his eponymous label in 2011, quickly picked up by Barneys New York and Bergdorf Goodman.

Jewelry

Armstrong's signature is a technique he calls stone plisse, which suspends and pleats stones in metal so the finished piece moves the way draped fabric does, a direct carryover from his years designing textiles. It is also why an architecture degree keeps coming up in profiles of him, the engineering behind the pieces is not incidental. These are pieces built by someone who thinks in structure first.

More Jewelry

A further cut of the same body of work, including Armstrong's proprietary stone cuts, which he developed specifically because standard cuts did not do what he wanted with color and light. His earlier label, Anthony Nak, won a CFDA Swarovski award for accessory design in 2005, so the instinct for engineered, unconventional jewelry predates this eponymous line by years. This grouping shows that instinct at full maturity.

Our honest take

Nak Armstrong is a case of a second act being more assured than the first, a designer who had already won industry recognition once before starting over on his own terms in 2011. The stone-plisse technique is a genuine point of difference rather than a marketing phrase, since it comes from an actual textile and architecture background. It suits a shopper who wants fine jewelry with a real technical story behind it, not just a name.