Pretty things

When I think about Douglas, I think about metal. Metal was his material of choice and was his first go-to for making his ideas real. Metal is really versatile, you can bend it, mould it, melt it, cut and shape it, stamp it, stick it to other things, and more. Both the workshop and our house seemed filled with metal (notoriously he once filled a squirrel hole in our loft with it), and nothing to me seems more like Douglas than a collection like this:

This is a gathering of some of his jewellery from over the years, Douglas at play. Let’s take a closer look.

These are prototypes of what I think are brooch pins Douglas made for a company named something like Pure Fabrication. I’m fairly sure they don’t exist any more, but I like the fun and energy of these, showing Douglas on a whimsical day.

These are a pair of earrings and a cufflink that Douglas made for Jasper Conran in the early 1990s. Glass beads stitched to a fabric backing. Douglas sometimes incorporated beads into other designs, like these sketches of buckles here:

And a couple of real-life incorporations:

Then there is this, that he made for Betty Jackson:

This necklace is made from aluminium wire twisted to look like spaghetti, and they came with matching bracelets and brooches. I know, because I made a lot of the twisted wire sections, sitting in the workshop learning how to shape the metal into twists that were tight but not too tight. Some of them were sprayed with gold, and others were left silver. I wear this one a lot, and get a lot of comments about it still. Not all of his jewellery is wearable, however. Take a look at this:

I really love this bracelet. I like it’s semi-organic shapes, it’s post-apocalyptic armour chic. However the thing is so enormously heavy that it is impossible to wear for more than  a few minutes before you want to throw it across the room. This was a common problem with Douglas’s jewellery ideas, not all of them were practical. However, he did make me some lighter, very pretty and wearable pieces like these:

The silver needs a bit of a clean, but I wore them a lot. He also made me some pendants. Here are two of them:

All of these items are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the jewellery that Douglas made throughout his life. We know he did work for Bruce Oldfield, but we don’t know what, we also know that he made a necklace worn by Cher, as well as lots of individual buckles for high-end shoe maker John Lobb, and we are sure there was more. When Mum and I were going through Douglas’s things at Christmas, we found this:

 And inside:

Looking at them, we are pretty sure they are Douglas’s designs, with several key giveaways – the organic shapes, the coloured coating on the metal, the different metal blobs stuck onto a contrasting background, the impractical size and weight… perhaps someone from Liberty’s will know more about them.

Tags: betty jackson, design, jasper conran, Jewellery, Liberty's, metal