Vertigo

Vertigo

Taylor Sade started Vertigo in 2021 after buying out a closing lapidary's stock of oversized stones on a trip home to Phoenix, Arizona, then teaching herself to string beads despite having studied communication design at Parsons rather than jewelry making. She built the brand between Phoenix and New York, chunky amulets, medallions and hip belts in stones like turquoise, malachite and lapis lazuli, and a 2023 New York Times profile naming her pieces the necklace of the moment prompted her to quit her day job and run the label full time.

Jewelry

Every piece here traces back to the same origin: an impulsive buyout of a closing gemstone shop's leftover stock that Sade did not yet know was unusually rare. The result is jewelry built around large, specific stones first, with turquoise, onyx, jasper and lapis lazuli strung on leather cord rather than fine-jewelry chain, which is a very different starting point from most accessories labels.

Our honest take

Sade's path into jewelry was genuinely accidental, a design-school graduate who had never strung a bead before her first collection sold out over Instagram, and that scrappiness still comes through in how chunky and material-forward the pieces stay. It is a young brand riding a fast, celebrity-driven moment rather than decades of craft history, so it suits someone drawn to a specific look right now more than someone hunting for a long design lineage.