Pippa Toledo on Flair Magazine
Pippa Toledo is known best for her interior designwork, but it won’t be long before her name is made again with her handmade fashion accessories.
Last year, Pippa Toledo started with highly individual handbags, made from textiles in beautiful colours and textures and decorated with beads, tassels, metalwork and stones. They were hugely successful among those whowanted something different.
This summer, Pippa has extended her range with some stunning and highly decorative jewellery pieces that give new meaning to the word ‘fabulous’. The more spectacular pieces include large pendant necklaces and heavily adorned colliers that evoke a far more glamorous era of silk kaftans, flowing hair, hot colours and even hotter nights in Marrakech, St Tropez or the Italian Riviera. With pieces like these, what you are wearing just becomes a backdrop to what is around your neck, so clothes are best kept simple in block colours and plain shapes, like a black jersey dress, a white linen shift, or a silk kaftan in one of the colours of India.
There are slimmer, sleeker and more reserved pieces too, for wearing during the day or for those who are unable to cope with all the attention they’ll get with the more dramatic necklaces. But all of them have the same thing in common, in that they are crafted entirely by hand from authentic natural materials, stones, glass beads, metal pieces, leather, chains and cord.
The absolutely beautiful wrist-bands, which are buttoned around the wrist to form a huge bracelet tight to the arm, are intricate arrangements of beads and stones sewn by hand onto a strap covered in crochet work.There are crochet earrings too, in gold, silver, white and all manner of colours, which strongly evoke the 1960s era of gold and silver crochet bikinis, shift dresses, tote bags and shrugs – except that nobody thought of turning crochet into earrings back then.
No two pieces are the same. Each necklace, bracelet, ring or earring is unique, and all of them bear the unmistakable mark of something really special.
