Fashionlady’s Heed on Jewelry Designers Intensifies-Part 4

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After discussing on jewelry designers’ ethereal connection with India’s age-old traditional art, in this edition Fashionlady focuses on a particular designer who thinks out of the box and believes in relating routine life with her creations – Eina Ahluwalia.  

Eina Ahluwalia

She is India’s first Conceptual Jewellery Artist to conceive designs from her soul. Her creation is her  sui generis way of telling her story to the world. Her designs evolves her response to life and enables her express herself through her ornate art pieces which are indeed timeless and have a sublime element.

As per her, her designs have helped her discover herself with true meaning of her life and existence. Read on!

Eina’s Turning Point

The Kolkata-based jewelry designer, who had a blessed career in corporate 4 years ago, says that she always loved jewelry, but never ever imagined that she would be making it. She always wanted to leave a mark and that when she would be reviewing her career after turning 60, life shouldn’t seem to be her meaningless.

Like other designers, she had also started this career without having a knack in this field. It is only through her growing years, she could learn a lot from the craftsmen she had worked with. She asserts that the conceptual art jewelry came by chance to her.

Keeping up the legacy

Each of her creation is handcrafted in Kolkata to keep alive the heritage skills which have been passed down from generations, but have somewhere been lost because of the mass production.

Eina’s initiative has enabled those craftsmen to get the opportunity to earn their livelihood with dignity. Her signature style is elaborate and alluringly intricate. Her work heavily relies on the fine-grained handcrafted framework, which has now become imperiled, with only a handful of craftsmen left in the country.

She has been working with those skilled artisans since 2003 and has managed to hone their skills to such a level of perfection that many a times her pieces are mistaken to be machine or laser cut.

She imbibes this appliqué in each of her designs, thereby assuring these skilled workers that theirs is not the last generation to contribute their skills in this form of art, but their contribution is going to make these pieces timeless and demanding than ever.

Inspired from within

For her the conceptual art form is much more important than jewelry, which is just a fashion to tell her story. Like fine art, jewelry is evaluated through creative ideas, content and intuitions rather than through its materials or precision only to cater to the tradition.

As per her,

“The creative process begins with a lot of coffee and angst. I have to reach within myself and sift through a lot of thoughts and ideas to find the one strong story that needs to be shared.”

Eina takes inspiration from her life and by synthesizing experiences. The ideas of her collection come from a place deep within either through realization or strong conviction or as a result of cathartic experience.

 Eina was trained under the spearhead conceptual jeweler Ruudt Peters in Holland, and studied jewelry designing at Alchimia Contemporary Jewellery School in Florence, Italy, where she presently is employed as India Advisor.

She was nominated for “Best Jewellery Designer” by Marie Claire India for two consecutive years, and David Lamb- MD of Jewellery at World Gold Council has tagged her as one of the hottest talents in the block.

Her label is a regular at Lakme Fashion Week, India with independent runway shows since 2009 and is frequently featured in magazines such as Vogue, Marie Claire, Harpers Bazaar, Elle, Grazia and Cosmopolitan.

The KITSCH store located in Mumbai and New Delhi have recently launched Eina Ahluwalia’s collections.

Spearheaded by entrepreneur sister duo Charu & Priya Sachdev, the Kitsch boutique is a luxury destination for brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Saint Laurent Paris,Victoria Beckham, Celine, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen (AMQ), Diane Von Furstenberg, Herve Leger, Halston Heritage and more.

Hope you enjoyed this column!