Jewellery Designer’s Success

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31154, 2 September 1966, Page 2

Jewellery Designer’s Success

Inexpensive jewellery of the kind most women wear should be so well-designed that they want to keep it, and not discard it with a change of fashion.

This is the belief of a young jewellery designer, Miss Katherine Fedden, aged 22, a student in the jewellery design department of London’s Central School of Art and Design, , who has won a commendation for her entry in an important competition for the design of a diamond engagement ring. There were 300 entries in the competition, and Miss Fedden’s ring was one of the 'nine purchased for the permanent collection of De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd.,

which organised the event. Miss Fedden said: “I do not see why there should not be as high a standard in the design of inexpensive jewellery as in that using precious metals and stones. “Garnets, for example, can be used as effectively as diamonds for a ring —and, personally, I like using quartz.” Her entry was the first design that Miss Fedden had worked in diamonds. The ring with which she gained her success consists of

four smaller rings set in a spiral so that the diamonds cross the finger diagonally, and this gives an unusual fan effect (below). It was made originally for a London boutique called Cameo Corner which advanced the money for the gold and diamonds. At the School of Art and Design I usually work with silver and other metals and semi-precious stones, as we have to buy all our own materials,” Miss Fedden said. As she talked she was working at her bench on a wide silver bracelet which had a raised open-work pattern over a plain silver background. “My teacher told me this design would never work,” she said, “because of clasping and unclasping the bracelet. But I found a way to make it possible.” Miss Fedden is now in the last weeks of a three-year apprenticeship and was full of praise for the school, which crowds into three years skills which, if one were apprenticed to a silversmith, might take seven years to learn.

At present there are 10 students in her class, and together with one of them, Miss Monica Peiser, whose parents come from Berlin, she hopes soon to start a workshop in London.

“We shall try to sell our work to the boutiques,” she said, “and in that way to build up a clientele of private buyers. W’e particularly want to make jewellery for young people at prices they can afford—say from £2 to £l2. 1 feel sure there is a market for well-designed, inexpensive jewellery both in Britain and overseas.”

Miss Fedden was born in Cairo of British parents and has lived in England since she was 18 months old. Before taking up jewellery design, she studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of London, and was interested in geology and rock formation.

“But I have always wanted to work with my hands.” she said, “and I am sure my archaeological work has helped my designs. The drawings I have made from geological structures, for instance, have given me the feel of structure when working with metal and crystal. All jewellery is three-dimensional, though it is only with drop earrings that all three dimensions show: that is why I like designing earrings most of all.” Miss Fedden loves travel and has already been in Spain, Morocco, Greece and Italy. In Crete she spent hours in the museums studying Minoan jewellery which she greatly admires, especially for its simplicity. “There are two distinct trends in modern jewellery,” she said, “one which aims at simplicity, the other which is more elaborate. One can well combine the two. but I prefer simplicity.” Some rings she has made are elegantly simple—plain bands of metal bolding a single stone; but her brooches have spiky, bizarre effect. “One has to learn,” she said, “what can be done with various metals, and how to set stones.”