A Look Inside Patricia von Musulin's Studio

With a studied artistic approach and a fervor for all things three-dimensional, Patricia von Musulin creates striking designs that transcend time, fashion trends, and traditional perceptions of accessories.

Von Musulin, whose career has spanned over forty years, engages in her creative process not just as an accessories designer, but as a lifelong enthusiast of art and sculpture. With a background in industrial design, she began her career focusing on much larger constructions. She made ancient Egyptian reproductions for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, created corporate gifts and awards for Tiffany's, and even dabbled in automobile design. Because of this, she carefully considers the shape, composition, and structure of her jewelry pieces as fervently as she considers their wearability. She also favors age-old materials—like ebony and silver—with which to mold, sculpt, or set. "I think I tend toward things that are ancient or things with historical value," she explains.

The resulting creations, which she makes in her New York studio and a secondary space outside of the city, uphold her aim to redefine what accessories can be. Exuberant yet intentional, her necklaces, bracelets, beads, pendants, rings, and homewares boast a harmonious physical rhythm, one that not only feels organic but predestined—even a bit fated.

The same could be said for her career at large, which over the decades has included collaborations with everyone from Michael Kors to Carolina Herrera to Ralph Lauren. Von Musulin admits that she initially had no interest in jewelry but shortly after she finished graduate school, she was asked to design several pairs of earrings, which she crafted out of silver. One pair then ended up on the cover of Town & Country Magazine.

These unplanned opportunities have continued throughout her career. Von Musulin claims she has continuously "fallen in the door" when it comes to her many successes and partnerships, in that she's rarely ever had to solicit them for herself. Over the years, she's harbored relationships with some of fashion's most legendary figures, like Geoffrey Beene, Perry Ellis, and Gloria Vanderbilt—a good friend who called her creations "sculptural works of art created by a genius.

Richard Avedon also helped to ingrain her work in the archives of fashion history with his photograph, "Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent." Taken in 1981, the eminent black-and-white photograph features the German actor lying on her side, adorned only by a slithering snake and one of von Musulin's striking carved bracelets.

The same artistic vision that caught the eyes of Ellis and Avedon is in just as much demand today. In 2021, von Musulin's work was featured in Volume 3 of Rihanna's Savage × Fenty show. She has also collaborated with LaQuan Smith for several runway shows, including his Spring 2023 show and his Fall 2022 show, made particularly memorable by Julia Fox's revenge dress.

While detailing her most recent work with Smith, presented last February at New York Fashion Week, von Musulin paused to reflect on the breadth of her career, recalling an event over thirty years prior for which she contributed pieces early on in her career—a show for the French-American designer Pauline Trigère at the Pierre Hotel. With a generation between the two shows, Trigère's stately constructions backdropped by the hotel's elegance would offer a striking contrast with Smith's contemporary and unquestionably sexy showcase at Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room. But the incredible commonality between the two shows, designers, and decades is von Musulin's venerated accessories. "The pieces I do tend to last forever, they seem to just go on and on," she says. "People don't seem to get tired of them."

For more information, please visit PatriciavonMusulin.com.

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