How Monies incorporates natural forms and creative disorder into their handmade jewelry.
Bold in form, innovative in material and sensational in scale, Danish boutique Monies creates jewelry with an emphasis on globally sourced materials. Featuring organic shapes and memorable mediums, Monies incorporates the natural beauty in every piece produced in their Copenhagen studio.
The Monies workshop is a tactile playground. Boxes of amber and pearls lie scattered around mock-ups of necklaces consisting of large shards of crystal and granite. Workers float between tables, feeling each stone in order to intuit the material’s size and texture, building a mental blueprint of a potential necklace or bracelet. Discussions abound over how to transform a slab of quartz into a pendant or most efficiently string pieces of tourmaline.
The world-renowned jewelry workshop is the product of Danish couple Gerda and Nikolai Monies whose classical training as goldsmiths and love for unconventional materials led them to explore the boundaries of form and size within jewelry. Since its inception in 1973, Monies has come to define avant-garde bijouterie and attracted countless admirers, including the couple’s sons, Karl and Niels Monies, who promise to continue the brand’s trailblazing creativity for decades to come.
Monies’ distinct jewelry owes its uniqueness to a highly specialized production process that incorporates the natural form of their materials. Whether it be gemstones, pearls, wood or fossils, all of the brand’s rich materials pass through a bespoke assembly process which enhances the natural beauty of each piece while preserving its character. Monies incorporates both cutting edge technologies as well as hand crafted techniques to mold material into complex pieces.
While at first glance the stones and shells that make up Monies jewelry may seem chaotic and rough, it is this natural aesthetic that the studio strives to create. This organic collection of materials and shapes is painstakingly designed to evoke a sort of “perfect chaos.” Creative Director, Karl Monies looks to source materials with irregularities, and those that aren’t “manipulated or shaped by hands in any way.”
Each Monies piece tells a unique story, framed by the natural processes that create its elements. A necklace might contain a 12 million year-old geode from South America, a 40 million year-old piece of Eastern European amber, a prehistoric shark tooth or a 100,000 year-old mammoth tusk. Their origins demand recognition and perspective, and Monies reminds us that while humans come and go, their jewelry is as timeless as the material from which it comes.
