Labours of Love

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The first time I saw a Pamela Love piece it struck a chord. The jewellery designer’s items carry a sort of morbid intrigue that has always had a place in both art and fashion, from bird skulls to talons the handmade pieces that seem to sum up our fascination with the underworld this past decade. Love’s carefully crafted eagle talon sat on a Nordic vampire’s neck in the True Blood television series, it became the tangible symbol of the hit series and has now sold out three times online to the True Blood audience, satiating that hunger for all things vampire.
As fashion becomes ever more curious of darker and heavier themes, it’s no surprise that designers like Zac Posen and Yigal Azrouël have reached out to Pamela Love. For them, her pieces were the perfect medium to translate their vision on the runway, her aesthetic was the reason downtown New York boutique Opening Ceremony exclusively approached her to conceive a line for Spike Jonze’s movie Where The Wild Things Are. The result of this collaboration is a line of intricately crafted crowns and horns that are bound to make anyone who read the book as a child reminisce fondly and wholeheartedly.
The designer herself has drawn inspiration from other industries.  Pamela started as a film student at NYU and spent her spare time as a painting assistant to renowned artist Francesco Clemente, “Working with Francesco has affected my overall aesthetic,” says Love, “It has changed the way I see everything around me”.  Love spends up to 60 hours crafting a single mold for her jewelry, perfecting her aesthetic and using the best materials, all for a relatively low profit margin. “These pieces are really just labors of love” she says.
The past decade was a whirlwind year for the jewellery designer, “I started out this decade as a teenager!” she says, “Jewellery went from being a hobby to an actual career”.  The noughties might have been the years where Pamela Love came into her own but she’s always had a passion for the sixties and seventies, “I really love the freedom and the styles from those periods as well as the music,” she says. “As a kid, I always felt most connected to those times and wished I could travel back and live then”.  Love’s design aesthetic is nearly always inspired by the past, “I think much of my current collection is inspired by jewellery, fashion, and art from very far back, even as far back as primitive times coupled with the sixties, seventies, eighties and even the early nineties.”
As for the future Love plans to stay in the world of crafting and molding and devoting hours to her talons. I mean, hey, as long as there are vampires there will be talons.