MALLARINO: Where Colombian Craft Meets Parisian Elegance
Antakly Projects · The Conversation
Mallarino
Lucia and Isabella Bueno-Mallarino on filigree, emeralds, and the slow art of keeping a tradition alive
Paris · Cali · New York
Why this conversation
What I love about Mallarino is that it began as an act of preservation rather than ambition. Lucia and Isabella Bueno came to jewellery because a Colombian tradition, the hand assembly of filigree passed from one generation to the next, was quietly disappearing under the weight of mass production and cheap imports. They did not set out to disrupt anything. They set out to keep something. The result is a line of pieces that hold two places at once, the wildness of the Colombian jungle and the restraint of a Paris drawing room, and that refuse to choose between them.
A jewel you can find in your grandmother’s drawer, that you and your mother could share.Mallarino
The thread and the green
Filigree is one of those crafts that looks like lace and behaves like patience. Gold or silver is drawn into threads finer than a millimetre, then coiled, braided, and laid by hand onto a base. In Colombia the technique reaches back to the Zenú and Tairona, deepened through the colonial period, and settled most famously in Mompox, the river town on the Magdalena that UNESCO now lists for exactly this reason. A simple piece can take a day. A dense one can take weeks. Every join still depends on the hand.
And then there is the green. Colombian emeralds, the Muzo green above all, carry a saturation that collectors call pure, free of the blue or yellow cast you find in stones from Zambia or Brazil. The Andean story has it that emeralds were the tears a princess wept for a dead prince. In Mallarino’s work the stones are not decoration so much as the reason for the setting, the fixed point around which the filigree organises itself.
The Conversation
How did Mallarino begin?
Mallarino brings together European sophistication and the savoir-faire of Colombian artisans. The art of hand-sewing jewels in Colombia has been passed from father to son for centuries, and it demands extraordinary manual skill. With mass production and cheap imports, that knowledge was under threat by the minute, so the need to preserve it is really what pulled us into design. The brand was created in Paris. Today Lucia runs the company, and Isabella helps with the designing and the decisions while she finishes her PhD on the justice mechanisms used to deal with the consequences of the Colombian conflict.
Where do you find your inspiration?
Nature, above all. The Colombian jungles are breathtaking, a mixture of wildness and extremely delicate beauty, and that contrast is enormously inspiring. Our pieces try to reflect that harmony, the exact point where two opposing forces combine naturally and make something magical.
Favourite places to wander, in Paris and in Colombia?
In Paris: Saïki, for the jewellery selection. Drouot, the auction house. The Marché aux Puces, a little over exposed now but still keeping its magic corners. And Gaetan Lanzani, a house that started in the 1930s making period furniture and restorations and is now a box of Pandora, six thousand square metres of objects to rent or simply be inspired by. In Colombia: OqShoes, for their chic and comfortable ballerinas, and Top Deco for furniture.
Who is the woman you picture when you design?
There is no particular girl. We think more about the piece itself, a jewel you might find in your grandmother’s drawer, one that you and your mother could share. We feel flattered when we see an elegant woman wearing our jewellery one day, and a cool, bohemian young girl wearing the same necklace the next. Beautiful pieces are timeless.
The places online you keep returning to?
A few, across what we love:
- DesignJongeriuslab
- FashionNet-a-Porter
- EditionTjaneski, We Are Design Studio, Mogollon
- FoodSimply Breakfast
- PhotoAlex DDR, Fashion Gone Rogue, Billy Kidd, Andreas Sjödin
Your fashion icons?
Kate, Vanessa, Alexa, Audrey, Jackie, Rania, Coco.
The hardest part of building your own brand?
Creating a jewellery brand that is authentic and timeless, loyal at once to the savoir-faire of the Colombian artisans and to a certain Parisian classiness.
Their pieces have travelled further than either sister expected, from select shops between Paris and Moscow to, one surprising day, a photograph of Michelle Obama at a reception wearing a pair of their earrings. But the part that stays with me is smaller and truer: the idea of a thing made slowly enough that it can pass between a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter without ever once looking dated.
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