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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



    Weird, I could've sworn we had a thread on him. Anyway, I am usually pretty cold when it comes to jewelry, but this guy makes some absolutely incredible things. I think his colloboration with McQueen is the best in fashion. I think his stuff is everything I want, romantic, edgy, moody, light and heavy at the same time.



    Here is a recent article on him.









    Danger: rocks


    Last Updated: 12:01amGMT09/12/2006

    Shaun
    Leane's jewellery is gothic, macabre and eminently covetable. Sarah
    Mower caught up with the diamond geezer who is shaking up a deeply
    traditional trade

    When I first met Shaun Leane, he was hunched on a bench in Terminal 1 at Heathrow waiting for a flight to New York.

    18ct yellow gold, red enamel thorned locket, £2,625

    We
    were both on the way to the opening of the 'AngloMania' British fashion
    exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May, and there he was:
    a small, exhausted guy in a parka, looking as if he had just rolled out
    of a club. Incorrect. An unlikely-looking a lad he may be, but Shaun
    Leane is Britain's Luxury Jewellery Designer of the Year, a craftsman
    of diamonds with a wicked imagination, who in February was made Freeman
    of the City of London by the Goldsmiths' Company.

    Leane
    shook himself as I sat down next to him and stifled a yawn. 'Sorry,' he
    said. 'I've just been up six nights making these.' Digging in his coat,
    he brought out a pair of brooches ? a concoction of heavy-metal barbed
    thistle and black Tahitian pearl ? designed and made in short order for
    Alexander McQueen for the AngloMania ball. 'He only decided he wanted
    them last week. Typical! Knows I'll work round the clock, doesn't he?'

    Several
    hours later, Leane's brooches were processing past paparazzi up the
    steps of the museum, pinned to the tartan-swathed shoulders of McQueen
    and his date, Sarah Jessica Parker (dressed in matching kilts from
    McQueen's winter collection).

    Meanwhile, Leane,
    by then suited and booted, was inside the exhibition, laughing his head
    off in the 'Death Room'. There, Queen Victoria was leaning over
    Albert's deathbed, shadowed by a menacing figure encased in a monstrous
    glinting silver corset moulded in the form of a human thorax, complete
    with ribs and vertebrae. 'See,' Leane hissed gleefully. 'Macabre, isn't
    it?'

    The
    skeleto-corset was Leane's earliest collaboration with McQueen, dating
    from 1992. The Leane-McQueen creative relationship had been forged in a
    pub (the Three Compasses in Old Compton Street in Soho, to be exact),
    while McQueen was a St Martins student and Leane still learning how to
    set diamonds.

    'We're very similar,' Leane
    cackled. 'Even our upbringing. We're Londoners ? he's East End, I'm
    Finsbury Park. His dad was a taxi driver, mine's Irish building-trade.
    He trained in Savile Row as a tailor, I was an apprentice in Hatton
    Garden. We both reference history, but don't want to get trapped in it.
    He starts with a concept, I add to it, and then get carried away.'

    The
    pair's peculiar Dickensian-gothic, punk-primitive imaginations have
    stewed up some of the nastiest and most amazing sights in British
    fashion history: vicious tooth-baring mouth-braces, ear-pieces made of
    porcupine quills, a silver yashmak, a pair of body-impaling spears and,
    for this winter, Edwardian-nightmare hats stuffed with metal nests and
    bird skulls. 'Macabre' is their watchword.

    In the
    beginning, Leane seemed almost perfectly cast as a latter-day Artful
    Dodger to McQueen's more terrifying Bill Sikes: faintly unnerving
    fashion outsiders with a fixed antipathy to the establishment. Now,
    though, 10 years on, Leane is at the centre of things: work embraced by
    the Metro-politan Museum, a darling of edgy heiresses and loaded
    artists, and a poster-boy for a new wave of energy in British fine
    jewellery design.

    'It's a very rare thing to
    find such an offbeat, creative designer making his way in an area so
    entrenched in tradition,' says the jewellery historian and consultant
    Vivienne Becker, who picked out Leane's talent in the mid-1990s. 'All
    the old barriers have been breaking down. In the past five years,
    diamond jewellery has become democratised. Everyone feels entitled to
    buy it now. It's an incredibly significant moment in the history of
    modern jewellery.'

    Having set up his costume
    jewellery business in 1997, Leane's most significant breaching of the
    barriers came last year with the launch of his own collection of
    precious jewellery. It includes decadent, tendrilled lily-shaped rings
    set with sapphire, amethyst and diamonds, ruby poison-rings, blood-red
    heart-shaped enamelled lockets, sharp tusk earrings and stacking,
    interlocking engagement rings that wind around a finger like delicate
    thorns. 'Modern romance is my feel,' he says.

    Elton
    John bought two of his black diamond rings on sight; the heiress Daphne
    Guinness, the artist Sam Taylor-Wood and the singer Björk are private
    bespoke customers, and when Jefferson Hack proposed to the supermodel
    Anouk Lepere in September, they beat a path directly to Leane's Hatton
    Wall workshop to ask him to design a ring he describes as 'a cascade of
    rubies, dark and seductive'. By popular demand, Leane also sells his
    expensive jewellery through his website (prices range from £1,200 to
    almost £10,000) ? much to his own astonishment. 'I set up the site just
    so the press could use it instead of coming into the studio all the
    time. But then people started e-mailing saying they wanted to buy. I
    always thought people wanted to look at a piece and try it on before
    they bought. But no. They're buying.'

    Not bad for
    a YTS boy who flunked out of school with barely a CSE to his name. An
    irrepressible hybrid of north London sparrow and Irish blarney, Leane
    spent his New York trip entertaining all and sundry with tales of the
    odd and hilarious from his unconventional upbringing. 'I left school at
    15 and went to work for my dad in his construction firm. I mean, me,
    with builders! It wasn't going to work, was it?'

    An
    only child who had yet to come out to his parents, Leane went down to
    the careers office and announced he wanted to go into fashion. 'The man
    said, "You can't do that, you're too young and you've got no
    qualifications, but what about jewellery-making? You can get a YTS
    apprenticeship, study and get £33 a week." I thought, sounds all right
    to me. When I told my dad, he went through the roof. But my mum put her
    head on one side and went, "Ooooh!" She's gorgeous, my mum.'

    The
    surreal dimensions of young Shaun's imagination were, one can't help
    thinking, melded into their unusual shape by life in the family's
    sixbedroom Victorian house in Finsbury Park. 'I was brought up with a
    home full of mental patients. My mum was an adult carer to keep the
    house going. It never bothered me as a kid. I'd have a laugh with them.
    The lady in the bedroom next to me was a schizophrenic. When I was a
    teenager she used to like me because I played my music so loud it
    drowned out the voices in her head.'

    The YTS
    officer hit on exactly the thing to divert Leane from incipient
    delinquency. In 1985 he set off in his best patent shoes for Hatton
    Garden, queued on a winding staircase for an interview at English
    Traditional Jewellery, a tiny garret workshop owned by Brian Joslin and
    Richard Bullock, and got the job. 'They trained me in the traditional
    way for 13 years. They were like father figures. I sat between them and
    learnt such amazing stuff.'

    The company made
    jewellery for Garrard, Asprey and Mappin & Webb, but it was the
    antiques that passed through their hands that drew Leane in most. 'We
    restored Victorian, Art Nouveau and Deco jewellery. I learnt how
    everything was made, in each age, so distinctively. That's where I
    began to get my inspiration.' When Leane started making runway pieces
    for McQueen, his kindly employers let him use their workshop after
    hours. 'I'd sleep on the floor sometimes. Brian and Dick would come in
    on Monday morning, and there'd be skeletons hanging from the ceiling.'

    Hatton
    Garden has been London's diamond-trading and jewellery quarter since
    the 1870s. Leane's descriptions of Dickensian warrens of workshops,
    bullion dealers, gem polishers, apprentices and runners were so
    tantalising that I made him promise to show me around when we got back
    to London. Leane's studio was buzzing with young talent. 'There are
    nine of us here, and we make everything,' he said. 'I want to keep it
    that way, produced in England, to keep the quality, keep it British.
    We're growing quite fast, but truly I'm always happiest when I'm on the
    bench, making something. It calms me down, like swimming.'

    It's
    Leane's combination of meticulous old-school standards and fierce
    styling that is paying off, winning approval both in the stolid fine
    jewellery trade and the whim-driven fashion community, worlds that
    rarely meet, let alone agree. Even his father, with whom he had a long
    stand-off, came round to recognising his son's talent years ago and was
    proud to be able to go to the Guildhall with his wife to see him
    inducted as a Freeman of the City earlier this year. 'Yeah, that was
    really an honour, really nice,' Shaun chuckled. 'And do you know what?
    Now I can drive my cattle over London Bridge. And if I get drunk within
    the City walls, I have the right to command a policeman to escort me
    home. Might come in handy.'

    Then he took me on a
    short stroll to meet his former bosses, who are still working at the
    top of the steep staircase Leane first walked up when he was 15.
    Richard Bullock taught Brian Joslin his trade, and they both taught
    Leane, crammed together at benches side-by-side with two other
    jewellers in a space the size of a ship's galley. 'When Shaun came up
    here in the 1980s it was a time of great excess,' Joslin said. 'People
    were buying like crazy. Now that's died off, and a lot of the work's
    gone to China, but we're all right at the bespoke end. That's what we
    do here: high end. I think it must have left its mark on him.'

    Leane
    had relished painting a picture of the typical ramshackle conditions in
    which some of Britain's most priceless jewellery is hand-crafted. He
    joshed with his mentors that a hole in the floor had finally been
    mended, but was pleased to see that a grime-encrusted net curtain and a
    clutch of 1981 Wedding of Charles & Diana souvenir mugs (used as
    acid receptacles these past 25 years) were still in place. 'I think
    we've got some of the master-patterns Shaun did in here somewhere,'
    Joslin remarked. 'We still sell them.'

    Then, just
    as they were settling into a good bout of reminiscences, Leane looked
    at his watch and realised he had better get going. 'Got an appointment
    with my financial adviser,' he hollered as we clattered back down the
    stairs. Nothing serious, I hoped. 'Oh yes,' he said, deadpan. 'He's
    coming in to choose an engagement ring with his fiancee.'


















    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • xcoldricex
    Senior Member
    • Sep 2006
    • 1347

    #2
    Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer

    i have yet to handle any of this... scared to, cause i'll probably end up with an empty wallet :)

    Comment

    • Faust
      kitsch killer
      • Sep 2006
      • 37852

      #3
      Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



      [quote user="xcoldricex"]i have yet to handle any of this... scared to, cause i'll probably end up with an empty wallet :)
      [/quote]



      oh, yes, you will.



      here are the "feather" earrings I got for mrs. faust's birthday.



      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

      Comment

      • Servo2000
        Senior Member
        • Oct 2006
        • 2183

        #4
        Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer

        Meanwhile, Leane, by then suited and booted, was inside the exhibition, laughing his head off in the 'Death Room'. There, Queen Victoria was leaning over Albert's deathbed, shadowed by a menacing figure encased in a monstrous glinting silver corset moulded in the form of a human thorax, complete with ribs and vertebrae. 'See,' Leane hissed gleefully. 'Macabre, isn't it?'

        The skeleto-corset was Leane's earliest collaboration with McQueen, dating from 1992. The Leane-McQueen creative relationship had been forged in a pub (the Three Compasses in Old Compton Street in Soho, to be exact), while McQueen was a St Martins student and Leane still learning how to set diamonds.

        The pair's peculiar Dickensian-gothic, punk-primitive imaginations have stewed up some of the nastiest and most amazing sights in British fashion history: vicious tooth-baring mouth-braces, ear-pieces made of porcupine quills, a silver yashmak, a pair of body-impaling spears and, for this winter, Edwardian-nightmare hats stuffed with metal nests and bird skulls. 'Macabre' is their watchword.

        Sounds fascinating. Pictures available anywhere of the collaboration pieces?

        WTB: Rick Owens Padded MA-1 Bomber XS (LIMO / MOUNTAIN)

        Comment

        • JaridRose
          Member
          • Jan 2007
          • 50

          #5
          Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



          His stuff IS cool.




          I've never heard of him but I like him...




          I also like House of Waris alot. Yoox.com sells waris now, some cheap stuff.

          Comment

          • Faust
            kitsch killer
            • Sep 2006
            • 37852

            #6
            Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer

            [quote user="Servo2000"]

            Meanwhile, Leane, by then suited and booted, was inside the exhibition, laughing his head off in the 'Death Room'. There, Queen Victoria was leaning over Albert's deathbed, shadowed by a menacing figure encased in a monstrous glinting silver corset moulded in the form of a human thorax, complete with ribs and vertebrae. 'See,' Leane hissed gleefully. 'Macabre, isn't it?'

            The skeleto-corset was Leane's earliest collaboration with McQueen, dating from 1992. The Leane-McQueen creative relationship had been forged in a pub (the Three Compasses in Old Compton Street in Soho, to be exact), while McQueen was a St Martins student and Leane still learning how to set diamonds.

            The pair's peculiar Dickensian-gothic, punk-primitive imaginations have stewed up some of the nastiest and most amazing sights in British fashion history: vicious tooth-baring mouth-braces, ear-pieces made of porcupine quills, a silver yashmak, a pair of body-impaling spears and, for this winter, Edwardian-nightmare hats stuffed with metal nests and bird skulls. 'Macabre' is their watchword.

            Sounds fascinating. Pictures available anywhere of the collaboration pieces?



            [/quote]



            On my blog, of course :-)





            I would need a scanner to scan the silver spine corset...

            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

            Comment

            • Faust
              kitsch killer
              • Sep 2006
              • 37852

              #7
              Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



              the brooch on SJP and McQueen mentioned in the article (disregard SJP)






              Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

              StyleZeitgeist Magazine

              Comment

              • Faust
                kitsch killer
                • Sep 2006
                • 37852

                #8
                Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



                some images a quick google search lended



                this thing is insane





                hook my heart collection



                Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                Comment

                • Faust
                  kitsch killer
                  • Sep 2006
                  • 37852

                  #9
                  Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



                  sterling silver corset for McQueen





                  also for mcqueen





                  Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                  StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                  Comment

                  • xcoldricex
                    Senior Member
                    • Sep 2006
                    • 1347

                    #10
                    Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer

                    like the earrings! would love to see the brooch up close.

                    Comment

                    • Faust
                      kitsch killer
                      • Sep 2006
                      • 37852

                      #11
                      Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



                      another picture of the crazy butterfly thing













                      I can't find a still image of my favorite thing he did for McQueen, the two sterling silver spears coming out of the model's body, coupled with a bright red dress - it was a killer. You can see it as a first image in flash on Shaun Leane's website. There are also video's of his collaboration with McQueen - totally worth your time.



                      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                      Comment

                      • Faust
                        kitsch killer
                        • Sep 2006
                        • 37852

                        #12
                        Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



                        [quote user="xcoldricex"]like the earrings! would love to see the brooch up close.
                        [/quote]



                        I'll capture the real photo of the earrings tomorrow on my Windows machine at work from Leane's website (or you can do that yourself :-)). They are really stunning. His "feather" collection is the best I think. Horn collection is also really good.

                        Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                        StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                        Comment

                        • xcoldricex
                          Senior Member
                          • Sep 2006
                          • 1347

                          #13
                          Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer

                          make sure you click on the small squares on the right... lots of hellraiser-inspired pieces!!!

                          Comment

                          • JaridRose
                            Member
                            • Jan 2007
                            • 50

                            #14
                            Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer

                            Did I say I liked House of Waris too? This guy KILLS waris! holy crap!

                            Comment

                            • Faust
                              kitsch killer
                              • Sep 2006
                              • 37852

                              #15
                              Re: Shaun Leane - Jewelry Designer



                              [quote user="JaridRose"]Did I say I liked House of Waris too? This guy KILLS waris! holy crap![/quote]



                              Yes, he does, leaps and bounds. I've seen HoW in person, and to be honest, I think it's all hype. It looks really cheap.

                              Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                              StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                              Comment

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