Ten Thousand Things

Ten Thousand Things

Ron Anderson and David Rees, both self-taught jewelers who came out of fashion retail rather than formal design school, founded Ten Thousand Things in New York in 1991, taking their name from a line in the Tao Te Ching. The label helped bring personal, wearable fine jewelry back into fashion at a moment when magazines were dominated by oversized costume pieces, a shift cemented early when Kate Moss wore its small cross pearl earrings in her first Calvin Klein campaign in 1992. Here are some of my personal favorite items from the collection...

Jewelry

The house still hand-makes its pieces at the bench behind its West Village storefront, more than three decades after Anderson and Rees started out with no formal jewelry training. Their earliest work was built around exactly this kind of small, wearable piece, the opposite of the statement costume jewelry that dominated fashion pages when they began. That founding instinct is still the throughline here.

More Jewelry

A further cut of the same range, including designs descended from the brand's 1995 Chiclet, one of its earliest signature forms. Ten Thousand Things has stayed independent and self-produced for its entire history, which is unusual for a brand this established in fine jewelry. The pieces here carry that handmade, workshop-scale quality rather than anything mass-produced.

Still more Jewelry

This grouping leans on ideas the pair developed around 2000 with their Sculptural collection, when an interest in form, movement and articulation pushed the work beyond simple pendants and studs. It marked a shift from the brand's earliest, sparest pieces toward something more architectural without losing the personal scale that built its reputation. You can trace that evolution across these pieces.

Even more Jewelry

The final jewelry grouping rounds out a range that has quietly outlasted most of the labels that were hot in the same magazines back when Kate Moss first wore the brand's earrings in 1992. Anderson and Rees marked thirty years in business with a 2022 retrospective exhibition during New York Jewelry Week, a rare milestone for an independent jewelry house. This is the current, still-handmade chapter of that long run.

Our honest take

Ten Thousand Things has a legitimate claim to having helped shift fine jewelry back toward something personal rather than purely decorative, and more than thirty years later the founders are still making the pieces themselves. That kind of continuity is rare and worth taking seriously rather than treating as a nostalgia play. It rewards buying for the workmanship, not for any seasonal trend.