marieclaire.com.au 147IWAN BAAN; JERRY YIN
Wong acknowledges that Hadid
“had a reputation for being difficult”, but
says, “I think we all know that when
women are ambitious and want to get
things done, they call us difficult, rather
than powerful and strong.
“In person, Zaha was quite soft, very
feminine and sensual, and she had a
great sense of humour.”
It was Georg Jensen’s chairman
David Chu who first mooted the idea of a
collaboration when the pair met at the
opening of Hadid’s Wangjing Soho
Towers in Beijing in 2015.
For Hadid, the jewellery project
made perfect sense. She’d worked across
different disciplines but jewellery, the
construction of which can be seen as
tiny-scale architecture, was something
personally dear to her.
“When I met Zaha, the impression
was of a lot of hand jewellery – rings and
bangles,” says Wong. “So I wanted this
collection to be about the hand.”
The result is eight styles in sterling
silver – some rhodium plated with black
diamonds – that include three rings and
five bangles, featuring a dramatic twisted
cuff that Wong calls “a masterpiece”.
“Zaha understood that we are
innovators. So often jewellery is about
ornamentation, but Georg Jensen is
about design and intuition,” says Wong.
Two weeks after the Georg Jensen
Zaha Hadid Lamellae Collection was
launched in March, Hadid, who had
been in hospital with bronchitis, died of
a heart attack. She was 65.
“It was shocking,” says Wong. “But
she loved this jewellery, so ultimately it
is a joyful collection for us.”Hadid’s buildings
won her the world’s
most prestigious
architecture prizes.
Above: the Heydar
Aliyev Centre in
Azerbaijan and
(top) the Wangjing
Soho Towers in
Beijing, where
the Hadid-Jensen
collaboration was
first conceived.