The gentle curves of the gold and diamond pavé Helix earrings at first belie Kloto designer Senem Gençoğlu's past in product design, but take a closer look at the catch and you will see that aesthetics were not her only priority during the design process. The ear post fits snugly into its housing with the kind of smart click usually heard from a luxury car door, testament to her problem-solving past: "I've always started with the form," she tells me from her Istanbul atelier, "then I consider who is going to wear it and how they are going to get it on and off. Solving the puzzles in the collections is the fun part for me."
Her work feels fresh. Kloto's core collection has a hint of industrial chic, but once on the body, curves and rounded angles come to the fore for an altogether softer, more tactile effect. The new Twine earrings are a perfectly gender-fluid twist of gold finished with discrete silver hoops, while the 18kt Bolt bracelet holds all the timeless, never-leaves-the-wrist appeal of a modern Cartier Love bracelet or a Dinh Van Serrure, with its articulated hinge and ingenious lock mechanism.
Her target is style-led and inclusive, but “selfishly, I actually design for myself too," she admits, "something that would work for me throughout the day and into my evening”. Kloto's delicately engineered pieces hold equal appeal for a stylish professional in her forties and a twenty-something guy-about-town just getting into jewelry, and “style-wise, Tilda Swinton is an inspiration to me, I love how she plays with gender roles.” One can easily imagine Swinton rocking a Kloto interlocking ring or statement earring on the red carpet.
After studying as a product designer at Rhode Island School of Design, Gençoğlu began in furniture design, working for top-tier creators like Marcel Wanders and Lee Broom, where she enjoyed building her own language and developing physical relationships with the materials she worked with. "It was a learning curve to create forms and learn about the materials," she says, "then to get into mechanisms and how to solve problems with design." She carries the same thought processes into her jewelry: "I enjoyed creating the challenge, then solving it by thinking about who was going to wear it, and how."
For the daughter of a family of Turkish jewelers, the move towards adornment was a return to home. Today, her collections are crafted from recycled metals and ethically sourced diamonds in a family-owned workshop in Istanbul, drawing on her rich design career and generations of expertise to combine form and function. “When I met Senem I was very impressed by how passionate, as well as smart, about her work she was," says Valery Demure, a jewelry consultant and the director of Objet d'Emotion, the gallery taking Kloto to the international market. "I then realized she came from a jewelry family, but she is a designer with a clear vision and a hardworking businesswoman.”
Istanbul is ever-present in her work. The blend of gold and silver is an Ottoman tradition that she has remixed for today, with the added benefit of keeping her price points accessible; while the combinations of opposing elements and shapes in her pieces echoes the city's position at the border of Europe and Asia. She believes herself to have been "unconsciously influenced" by the geometry and curves of Islamic patterns and her city's wider culture: the Helix earrings carry a touch of the Whirling Dervish.
Such dynamic forms and sculptural shapes are born of an approach that is somewhat unusual in the jewelry world. Rather than be led by the stones and metals themselves, Gençoğlu's main concern is how to marry elegance and functionality, marking herself out in a marketplace in which comfort can often be sidelined in favor of the beauty of the object itself. She favors gold for the sturdiness that allows for complex forms, and employs gemstone embellishment judiciously, on pieces like the Cosmic ring, top, using white diamonds to highlight the shapes she creates, rather than making them the focus of the pieces themselves.
But the staring point for it all, is the idea of a welcoming inclusiveness, a lack of judgement that characterizes the upcoming generation and which comes, for this designer, from the philosophy of Rumi. “I love how she views jewelry as an expression of one’s individuality," says Demure, "it’s beyond trends, it’s ageless, it's genderless and timeless. This philosophy is conveyed through each design.” Kloto is the delicate balance of the universe in jewelry form, the chaos of creativity tempered with the order of reasoning, and in Gençoğlu's locks and hinges lies a reminder that we are all connected.
Kloto is available at Objet d’Emotion
