The Mermaid Collection: Where Chainmail Meets the Baroque
When I first started thinking about this collection, the first thing that came to mind were pearls.
Not perfect pearls but irregular ones. Baroque pearls with organic shapes, soft imperfections and fluid forms that feel almost alive. There is something uncanny about them, something ancient. They do not feel manufactured. They feel found.
Chainmail, on the other hand, exists in a completely different world.
Despite its fluid movement, it is a craft built through structure, repetition and mathematics. Every weave depends on precision: ring sizes, aspect ratios, tension, pattern. It is metal behaving almost like architecture: calculated, interconnected and deliberate.
That contrast eventually became the entire soul of the Mermaid Collection.
The idea of combining something fluid and organic with something structured and technical felt deeply interesting to me. It also became the perfect excuse to revisit one of the aesthetic movements I have always loved in jewelry: the Baroque.
The Baroque and the Deep
The Baroque era: roughly the 17th century, though its spirit extended far beyond, was defined by ornamentation, drama and emotion. It was an age of excess, where beauty was meant to overwhelm. Churches were covered in gold leaf and intricate carvings, paintings dissolved into shadow and light, and jewellery became elaborate, symbolic and deeply theatrical.
Pearls became one of the defining jewels of the period.
Unlike perfectly spherical pearls valued in later centuries, Baroque pearls were celebrated precisely because of their irregularity. Their unusual forms made every piece unique. They appeared in royal portraits, religious relics and elaborate jewelry worn by courts across Europe. Pulled from the sea, formed slowly through time and living matter, pearls carried something mysterious within them: something both precious and slightly unsettling.
That feeling is deeply connected to the mythology of mermaids.
Mermaids as Myth, Mermaids as Symbol
Long before modern fairy tales softened them into romantic figures, mermaids were symbols of duality.
In medieval and early European folklore, creatures like the Melusine existed between worlds: half woman, half aquatic being. They appeared in heraldry, religious carvings and mythology as symbols of temptation, transformation, beauty and danger. In Baroque art, sirens and sea nymphs emerged surrounded by coral, pearls and treasures pulled from the ocean depths.
They were never portrayed as harmless, they belonged to the unknown: to the threshold between human and creature, surface and abyss, seduction and destruction.
That tension became one of the emotional foundations of this collection.
The Collection: Fluid, Structured, Alive
The Mermaid Collection asks a simple question: What would a mermaid's jewelry look like if she had survived centuries beneath the sea, collecting fragments of drowned kingdoms and Baroque treasures?
The answer, for me, was chainmail.
Not the heavy brutality of armour, but chainmail transformed into something fluid, woven metal that moves like water and catches light like waves. Combined with freshwater pearls, crystals and layered details, the pieces feel suspended somewhere between relic and adornment.
Made by Hand, Made to Last
There is something fitting about using chainmail, one of the oldest metalworking techniques in history, to reinterpret Baroque jewelry and oceanic mythology through a contemporary lens.
Every piece in the Mermaid Collection is woven and assembled by hand in our studio aka home :) Some designs are made to order, while others, especially certain gold-toned pieces, are created as one of a kind objects and will not be reproduced exactly the same way again.
Freshwater pearls, layered chains and woven metal structures make each piece slightly different, embracing irregularity rather than perfection.
The Mermaid Collection is not about recreating historical jewelry. It is about imagining what survives underwater long after kingdoms disappear.
Coming 29th May
The Mermaid Collection launches on 29th May 2026.
If you have ever wanted to wear something that felt genuinely otherworldly, something that carries the weight of myth and the precision of craft, this is the collection we made for you.
The deep is rising. Watch this space.
All pictures are free domain.
Source:
https://www.nga.gov/
https://staging.free-images.com/