Vogue.com: The Rise of Jewelry Designers Trying Their Hand at Cutlery
For the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, food was a constant obsession in his personal life and his art. “My enlightenment is born and propagated through my guts,” he once said. The dinner parties that he and his wife Gala threw were infamous for their decadence and sense of imagination: guests would dress up in fancy dress and be served dishes like a fish plated inside satin slippers or a tray of jumpy frogs. While these dinners (and recipes for delicacies such as Steamed and Boiled Larks, Veal Cutlets Stuffed With Snails, Frog Pasties, and Toffee with Pine Cones) would go on to be memorialized in a cookbook he released in 1973, Les Dîners de Gala (republished by Taschen in 2016), he also manifested his gastronomic tendencies some 16 years earlier with a six-piece tableware set he released in 1957 that would sell for $28,125 when it came up for auction in 2012. Taking inspiration from foliage, the set comprised of an elephant fork with three teeth, a snail knife, a leaf knife, two artichoke spoons, and a fish fork with four teeth—all rendered in silver gilt with accents of ruby and sapphire.
Since then, Surrealism has become something of a wellspring of inspiration for creatives seeking to put their own spin on cutlery. The late Danish jeweler Arje Griegst, whose “baroque-punk vision” of jewelry melded Surrealism with Art Deco (such as a necklace inspired by Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”) first began sketching designs for a cutlery set in 1948, making a prototype in 1980 that was finally put into production by Danish design company, Georg Jensen, in a limited run from 2002 to 2003. Like Dalí, Griegst took his inspiration from nature, giving a squiggly biomorphic form to the handles of the sterling silver cutlery set which he aptly named ‘Spira’ (Sprout)—to symbolize growth and creation of life. “My father did it out of sheer rebelliousness—he wanted to defy the myth of Danish design as something cool and minimal,” says his son, Noam who took over the company after his father’s death and recently relaunched the range in collaboration with Georg Jensen in 2021. “Initially we were told nobody is buying cutlery,” says Griegst. “I thought I was not going to listen to them—people are longing for something special. I wanted to do something that supports our legacy.”
More recently, a new generation of jewelers has breathed new life and artistry into these most quotidian of objects. For the London-born, France-raised Gala Colivet Dennison who initially trained as a sculptor before moving into making abstract, sculptural rings and necklaces, experimenting with these functional objects was a challenging, if ultimately freeing, experience. “I did not have to deal with the restrictions that jewelry brings in terms of scale and weight,” she explains. After trying her hand at candlestick holders and pill boxes, Dennison was recently commissioned by the design dealer and interior designer, Jermaine Gallacher to make a set of sterling silver spoons for his magazine, Ton, that are now available to buy at Dover Street Market. The resulting spoons have a pleasing impracticality to them with a wide short handle and elongated bowl. “The base of the large spoon was initially a pill box and the head of the small spoon was originally an earring,” says Dennison. “I enjoy taking things apart and reworking them and finding a nice balance, whatever the size.”
Other jewelers have approached making cutlery as “a celebration of finding beauty in everyday rituals,” as Rosh Mahtani puts it. With the addition of a homewares range, Alighieri Casa to her 10-year-old jewelry brand, Alighieri, Mahtani is inviting us to slow down. “Our lives have become so digital and frantic; I want Alighieri Casa to be a return to the spiritual and tactical practice,” she says. “It’s an invitation to take a few minutes in the day for yourself, as you set the table.” The cutlery sets from the Casa range are sand-cast in brass and forged in stainless steel and were inspired by hulks of rock and tribal hunting tools. “I wanted these objects to feel tactile and grounding, like they’ve existed for centuries,” says Mahtani.
“Cutlery is something we touch every day, but it should also be something that delights us, that feels luxurious,” adds Danish jeweler, Orit Elhanati. As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Argentinian artist Conie Vallese titled Jardim, she recently debuted a collection of gold-plated sterling silver forks, spoons, and knives decorated with a shimmer of black diamonds and black spinels at Salone del Mobile 2024, as part of Alcova’s Villa Borsani exhibition. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of transforming the ordinary into something magical. We wanted to create pieces that make you pause, that make even a casual meal feel like an event,” says Elhanati. The raw yet refined pieces merge functionality with Elhanati’s fascination with the Gothic Victorian era: “We imagined these pieces as a connection between the past and present, like artifacts uncovered from another time.”
The elevation of cutlery to rarefied aesthetic heights seems to go hand in hand with the rise of food artists like Laila Gohar, who uses tablescapes as her canvas to create culinary trompe l’oeil. While some of the edible installations that Gohar has created for the likes of Simone Rocha, Hermès, and Valentino—think a sofa made out of bread or a champagne jelly of a koi fish stuffed with a rose—may harken back to Dalí’s dreamlike dinner parties, Gohar herself resists easy comparisons. “I don’t necessarily identify as a Surrealist because inspiration comes from different places,” she says. “I struggle with labels because I work in a multidisciplinary way.” In 2022, Gohar and her sister Nadia launched a playful homewares brand, Gohar World that features a chandelier designed to hold eggs, a lemon squeezer in the shape of a swan, and a hand-carved mother-of-pearl cutlery set made by a family atelier in Vietnam.
For Gohar, part of this increased interest in tableware can be ascribed to the pandemic. “With Covid, everyone was home and not spending on clothes so people started spending more on the home, and that never went away,” she says. Elhanati, meanwhile, sees an inherent connection between food and jewelry. “Both are deeply sensual experiences that are about indulging pleasure,” she says. “So why settle for the ordinary when you can have something extraordinary?”
