Anima
SS 2023
In summer 2023, the HELENA ROMANOVA brand presents a new collection "Anima" (lat. soul), including 23 models of various types of accessories: headdress, headband, eardrops, chokers, necklaces, gloves, bracelets and transforming body jewelry, mainly made of stainless steel, crystal and fine glass.
Plasticity of lines and silhouette solutions of the jewelry refer to the Art Nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its inherent stylized elements of nature, images of plants and insects. The collection is also inspired by the jewelry works of René Jules Lalique and the symbolism of butterflies.
The first sketches of the collection were created in 2021, in the same year custom steel parts, traditional for HELENA ROMANOVA, were designed and manufactured; later they will form compositional centers of accessories. Unfortunately, the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine delayed work on the collection; brand designer Olena Romanova returned to it only at the end of spring 2023. Working in hard and nervous conditions of daily air raids and shelling, with the new life experience acquired during the war, gave the collection new content, meanings and allegories embedded in it, in particular to the very concept of life and its value.
Stylized butterflies, rosettes of flowers and petals made of polished to mirror glance steel form compositional centers of the accessories. Their silhouette lines are continued by drop-styled pendants and multi-tiered strings of crystal and glass beads. Rose quartz, mother-of-pearl, textile flowers, glass and plastic also were used to embroid the headdress. Body jewelry-transformers are designed for a greater variety of ways of wearing and provide the owner an opportunity to change the composition of the product.
The shape and idea of a butterfly, as a symbol of the soul, rebirth on the one hand, and the fragility and ephemerality of life on the other, being made of practically indestructible stainless steel, acquires features of indestructibility and becomes a symbol of unexpected endurance and adaptation to the trials of fate.