Rachel Quinn

Rachel Quinn

Rachel Quinn trained first in painting and sculpture before moving to New York, where an apprenticeship with a Brooklyn jewelry artist pulled her into metalsmithing and led her to graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology's Metalsmith Program in 2009. She now hand-makes every piece out of a Downtown Los Angeles studio, working in a style she describes as romantic surrealism, part playful and part deeply sentimental.

Jewelry

Quinn's background in painting and sculpture is easy to spot in pieces that behave more like small narrative objects than standard settings. One recent example is her Gemfields collaboration, a collection built around a poem she wrote tracing the early stages of love, which gives a sense of how literally she treats jewelry as storytelling rather than adornment.

Our honest take

Rachel Quinn is a genuinely hand-bench operation rather than a design studio outsourcing production, and that shows in how specific and slightly odd some of these pieces are willing to be. If you want jewelry that reads as art with a wearable excuse, this is a more honest version of that idea than most labels attempting it.