Ibulliance: Chasing Beauty

Growing up in Tripoli, Jewels' Italian-born mother took her to visit bustling souks, ever pursuing their exotic jewelry. Later, on the cusp of her own adult life, Jewels took off for India, and discovered cultures so vibrant in color and incense, shrine and adoration, bead and charms and talismans, that, intoxicated, she stayed and made the bazaars of Bombay her school. She trained her eye on beauty.

In Bangkok, her search at the amulet market kept her diving deeper into other worlds, swooning in the heat and the hunt. In the riverbeds of Burma, she found ancient tossed coins, basic metal washed green with patina, stamped with mythical creatures. Magic to her eye. In foreign alleyways, Jewels found a path to her own singular and bold design. 

When I enter her atelier in Marrakech, Khadijah is braiding a complex design of fiber so soft it disappears on my neck. Jewel’s lifetime collection of antique treasures is here transformed through her designs into jewelry of power, layered in memory, history, culture, meaning, depth. It's breathtaking. This life of chasing beauty.

Our culture, we know, is being flattened. A surface imperviousness is lacquering our lives with sameness, forgetting depth, layers, meaning, soul.  Stories precious, dear, and deep are being tossed again into riverbeds and forgotten. Real beauty is scarce.

This is why I turn year after year to the rare treasures handcrafted by Khadijah and other women in Jewel’s atelier. Jewels has become the riverbed. She now mines the wealth of a lifetime. Even after twelve years with a debilitating disease, she will not stop. Her creative fire is incendiary. You can find her still wandering in the remotest towns, creeping through the warrens of a city market, chasing beauty. Or curled over her design table, turning all of those deep smoldering memories into fire.

I think that's very Ibu.

All the best,
Susan Hull Walker
Creative Director + Founder