Heaven Tanudiredja didn’t have a chance to tidy up the day I visited his Antwerp studio in early February, leaving his desk a maelstrom of beads, tools, and findings, punctuated by the odd Marlboro package. “Cigarettes and Red Bull — this is the real me,” he joked, apologizing for the mess. But to the uninitiated visitor, of course, it was a fascinating sight, a glimpse at the primordial soup that would soon be transformed into Tanudiredja’s ever-more-elaborate fall jewelry collection, which he’ll show this week in Paris. Because everything is made by hand in the studio, his desk is actually a production hub; with his line Heaven now in its ninth season, and his elaborate bead-encrusted necklaces selling for $5,000 at the likes of Barneys New York, Tanudiredja and his three-person team are responsible for churning out upwards of 300 pieces every six months, each of which takes 48 hours of exacting beadwork to construct. Hence the stimulants — not to mention the thick-rimmed glasses he has to wear while working as a consequence of his failing eyesight.
Despite the blood, sweat, and tears he’s poured into Heaven since founding the line in 2007, though, Tanudiredja never actually intended to be a jewelry designer. After studying fashion in his native Indonesia and then attending the graduate program at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, “I made jewelry at first because I had no budget to do clothes,” admits the 29-year-old, who at the time had begun working for John Galliano’s couture team at Christian Dior, and eventually Dries Van Noten as well. “I gave one piece to my teacher and people liked it, so they bought more from me. It happened little by little. I never expected to take it seriously.” That said, the line itself was anything but a whim. From day one Tanudiredja’s inspiration for the jewelry was intensely personal, focused around the French jet from the ’20s and ’30s he began collecting as a teen, while accompanying his grandmother on trips to Paris to visit the famed Clignancourt flea market. He still builds most of his pieces around the vintage black-glass beads. “It’s a part of my past, really,” he says.
It’s his devotion to vintage materials in general — and to the sense of uniqueness and quality they confer — that makes it difficult for Tanudiredja to have his jewelry produced outside the studio. Nothing about his process is standard. “That’s why we’re working nonstop,” he sighs, especially in the leadup to Paris fashion week, where he’ll present alongside fellow Antwerp talent Lena Lumelsky at the showroom of Comme des Garcons alum Florence Deschamps. But if things are crazy now, as I discovered during the studio visit I documented at right, they’re about to get a whole lot crazier: Tanudiredja is gearing up to finally launch his first clothing collection under the Heaven label, which will debut in September. Though he hasn’t settled on a concept yet, the wheels are already turning. “With jewelry, you only have the space around the neck to work in, and that’s it,” he says. “You have to put everything there: your thoughts, your creativity. It’s almost like a dream, and the clothes bring it into reality.”
Upon his 2007 graduation from the fashion program at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Heaven Tanudiredja started his eponymous jewelry line with a limited edition of five hand-beaded necklaces. Since then, his collections have grown enormously both in size and complexity; they’re now stocked at Barneys, Liberty, 10 Corso Como, and more. Above: Pieces from his Fall/Winter 2010-2011 lookbook.
Tanudiredja’s desk the day I visited his Antwerp studio. Most of the black beads are vintage French jet, which form the core of his collection. “Everything’s hand-made, and we produce everything here,” he says. Because of that, his necklaces typically sell for upwards of $5,000 in the U.S., “the price of a Birkin,” he marvels. Though for him, of course, it’s about quality, and creative ambition.
The idea for the line began with his love for vintage stones. “My grandmother would go to Clignancourt in the early ’90s to buy furniture,” he says. “Every time I’d go with her I’d bring back a few pieces of jet.” Having been trained in embroidery as a teen while apprenticing with a tailor in Bali, where he grew up, he incorporated beadwork first into his clothing at the Royal Academy, then his jewelry.
“Now I use a mix of vintage, new, and ’60s stones,” he says. Though he stalks the flea markets in Paris, Milan, and Florence for favored styles, and has dealers searching for him all over the globe, “I have this obsession where the fewer I find of any given bead, the more exciting it is.” To make it into his collection these days, however, he needs a minimum of 100 pieces.
Before he launched Heaven, of course, Tanudiredja was focused on clothing design, having studied fashion in Jakarta as an undergrad and worked for a local designer there. Pictured here is his Royal Academy graduation show, whose inspiration points included bullfighting costumes, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. He’ll launch his first professional clothing collection in September.
“Jewelry is so often overlooked in fashion, but it’s incredible,” Tanudiredja told Hint magazine of his adopted craft last summer. “The level of work and quality of materials that go into these tiny pieces is incomparable to anything else in fashion.” When it comes time to design the clothing line, “I’ll have to put the two together somehow,” he says.
During my visit, though, he and his staff of three were still resolutely focused on finishing the Fall/Winter 2011-2012 collection in time for this week’s Paris showcase. Here, an assistant hunkers down to begin sewing, armed with headphones and several pairs of needle-nosed pliers.
The team’s floor-through studio overlooks Antwerp on both ends, with a terrace out back for the occasional breath of fresh air. Tanudiredja likes working in the city because it offers so few distractions. It’s also affordable: “We’re all so poor here, we start from nothing,” he says.
Tanudiredja’s jewelry often starts here: with some kind of substrate the beads can be sewn onto, and built up in layers.
“The small beads we put on one by one, and the amount has to be the same throughout, so we have to count one by one,” says Tanudiredja — hence how it can take 48 hours to produce each individual piece, and how their price tags can climb so high.
“We try to control ourselves, though, and not to go too far with the designs, because then we have a problem with the production,” he says. Above: The final version of the blue necklace seen in the previous slide, from his Spring/Summer 2011 collection.
The jewelry’s intricacy stems from Tanudiredja’s aesthetic preoccupation with volume: “I don’t like just normal flat designs — I like the three-dimensional,” he says. “I look at what materials would go nicely together, and how we can build it up so it’s standing. That’s the way I work: I usually look at the material first. It’s the same with clothing. I look at the fabric first.”
Indeed, most of Tanudiredja’s design process happens tangibly, rather than on paper. “I figure each piece out as I’m making it,” he says. “Some designers do research; I like when it’s abstract. Sometimes I don’t even know where an idea came from.” His only objective, he adds, “is to create new shapes, and to make them look stronger than the previous season.” The piece shown here is loosely inspired by the movement of caterpillars.
This piece — actually one of his designs for men — is a “robot caterpillar,” he says.
And these had an even more elaborate concept: “I was thinking about all my classmates who are really talented, but they have difficulty surviving in fashion,” Tanudiredja explains. “I was dreaming of them as weird flowers that live inside cages. No one can touch them, but they don’t want to change whatever they’re trying to do.”
Despite the gargantuan effort that lies behind each Heaven necklace, most of the studio’s production methods are quite lo-fi. The most sophisticated piece of machinery is this electric drill press, used for making holes in beads and in some of the metal components Tanudiredja’s been experimenting with lately.
Those pieces — part of the Fall/Winter collection he’s launching this week — begin with flexible plastic stencils, which are used to trace components onto flat metal sheets.
The components are cut out using a hand saw at a workstation in the back of the studio.
They’re also lacquered by hand in the studio, a process which entailed a good deal of trial and error. “Normally lacquer isn’t applied to metal — it’s for wood or plastic,” he says. “We had to do a lot of experiments. The paint wasn’t sticking, so we had to try putting it in the oven, and washing it. We’ll have gold and silver, but I like it to be toned down, so we also did dark red.”
Some of the finished or nearly-finished necklaces, whose metal substrates are visible underneath all the beadwork.
Viewing one of the pieces in profile reveals the most incredible thing about its construction: Half of the beads aren’t even visible from above, but are merely there to give the piece dimension. These are the kinds of subtle details Tanudiredja loves.
A look from Heaven’s Spring/Summer 2010-11 season, which was the first time Tanudiredja focused on a transparent, ethereal aesthetic — a departure from all the jet and its corresponding heaviness.
That collection also included Tanudiredja’s most ambitious design to date, which was bought by Toronto socialite Stacey Kimel: “Each of these white beads costs 14 Euros, and we used 175 of them,” he says. “When I made this I didn’t think it would sell, but if you take it seriously enough, people get it. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Sometimes clients ask for custom designs, like the one Tanudiredja sketched out here. The text reads: “This necklace was inspired by diamonds that look like raindrops falling from the petal of the flower… The addition of colorful gems and platinum flowers to the diamond sparkles gives this waterfall a fresh and rejuvenating power.”
Another of the studio’s current experiments: Electroplating real seashells. “We get it done at a place that normally works with furniture, in another city in Belgium,” says Tanudiredja. “It’s a very difficult and expensive process, but the result is good; the more difficult the process in general, the better results you usually get.”
A testament to Tanudiredja’s enduring devotion to that principal are his glasses: His eyesight is already failing, a victim of the intense level of visual detail he works at on a daily basis. But the results are better than good — they’re spectacular. And for now, that’s all that matters.
“I grew up going to pow-wows and stuff” isn’t the first thing you expect Annie Lenon to say as she’s puttering around the garden apartment and studio she shares with her boyfriend in a brownstone in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. But then you recall that the 25-year-old jewelry-maker and Pratt grad hails from Bozeman, a city of 27,000 located in the southwestern corner of Montana — a state that with its prairies and badlands and Indian reservations seems downright exotic to most New Yorkers — and you realize she’s working from an entirely different reference point.
It takes the Zürich-based fashion duo Ikou Tschüss a full week to hand-knit the blankets from their winter collection — each ringed with dangling sleeves to appear as though it’s hugging the bed — and maybe a day to knit one of their bulky sweater dresses. Even silk shifts are hand-printed and edged with rows of crochet, the pair's signature trope. Add to all that labor the fact that Carmen D'Apollonio spends the majority of her time in New York, where she’s been the right-hand-woman to Swiss artist Urs Fischer for the past eight years, and it’s a good thing she and partner Guya Marini have help. “Most of our knitting is done by Swiss grandmothers now,” says Marini.
Since graduating from London’s Royal College of Art in 2006 with a master’s degree in womenswear, Eudon Choi has had his graduate collection picked up by the fanatically worshipped Dover Street Market, been a senior designer for Savannah and Sienna Miller's label Twenty8Twelve, and been called a “fabulous individual” by our favorite throwback men’s fashion mag Fantastic Man. All of which makes his decision to move to London in 2003 — after having already completed a master’s in menswear at Yonsei University in his hometown of Seoul — seem like a pretty good move. “London, and womenswear in particular, just felt like a place where I could be more experimental,” says Choi.
