Courtesy of Eddie Borgo
As Eddie Borgo’s brand continues to evolve, so does his woman. “We’ve been talking a lot as a brand about how we’ve been pegged as this ‘rock-and-roll’ jewelry company,” said Borgo during an appointment in his downtown New York studio. “But rock-and-roll doesn’t always have to be aggressive. There’s a romanticism and a bohemian nature in it as well. We played with that for Fall, and I liked the way that started to feel.” Following a totem-centric Resort ’15 range (one that incorporated the most color that Borgo has ever worked with), the designer’s Spring outing focuses on ancient and contemporary desert architecture (which, after studying Borgo’s mood board, I can tell you are eerily similar), experiments in geometry (domes and cylinders make their debut), and plume motifs that have an almost archeological feel.
Courtesy of Eddie Borgo
While conducting his research (and Borgo always does a lot of research), the designer stumbled upon a desert in Tunisia where several scenes from Star Wars had been filmed. “I was interested in the fact that there was this ancient Tunisian village, and then they brought in all this modern architecture. So I started to think about what the jewelry in a place like this would look like 200 years from now,” Borgo explained. “[My Spring woman] also became nomadic, and it’s as if she’s collected these amulets on her travels—they could be old or new,” he added. The result was a fusion of the ancient, the futuristic, and the galactic. The boldest baubles came in the form of necklaces, rings, and mammoth cuffs that combined different colored quartz. They looked like something out of Dune—in the best way possible. Elsewhere, feathers that resembled arrowheads were covered in crystals and turned into earrings or pendants, and glass-ground enamel garnished oversize bracelets. Borgo played a great deal with mismatched earrings here, and they were some of the most interesting styles in the collection.
On the whole, the Spring lineup was less “aggressive” than the pieces for which Borgo is typically known. And this softer, sophisticated approach is going to appeal to the longtime Borgo client who has grown up with the designer. However, anyone who’s nostalgic for the gritty, punk-tinged collections of yore need not fret. A five-finger ring that attaches neighboring digits with chains is old-school Borgo to the bone.
