LE NEZ DE TYCHO

Metal nipple pasties cast in silver or gold. All photographs by Samantha West.

I recently started working as the Head of Sales for Bijules, designed by friend Jules Kim. If you haven't heard of the line yet, you most certainly have seen it without realizing it; Jules has been designing for five years now, and has a client base that includes Beyonce, Katy Perry, Karen O, and just about every other A-list pop star on the charts right now (I heard that even little Willow Smith just borrowed some pieces).

As an expansion of her Bijules line, Jules has created her first Bijules Haute collection of fine jewelry, which is cast entirely from gold and sterling silver, yet remains entirely within the spirit of Jules's provocative and boundary-pushing aesthetic. The collection was inspired by Danish alchemist Tycho Brahe, who lost his nose in a gruesome duel, and who proceeded to replace it with a prosthetic nose made of gold. In turn, Jules has cast several parts of her own body, and turned them into highly personalized pieces of jewelry.

The most standard (but certainly not simple) piece in the collection is the articulated finger ring, which is molded from Jules's own finger. The collection then moves on to force us to rethink what we typically consider jewelry. There's a gold contact lens that can be worn in the eye (although with some admitted pain and discomfort), there's a smoking lip with an attached cigarette holder, meant to adorn your upper lip as you smoke, and then there's a pair of metal nipple-shaped pasties, which need no explanation. Since many of these pieces are meant to be objets d'art, Jules has also created a chess set with a matching handkerchief chess board, and a set of dueling debutant gloves, whose fingers are filled with 24 karat gold shot to make it a dangerous (and deadly expensive) weapon. Take a good look at the lookbook (modeled by Jules herself), I guarantee you won't be seeing anything like it anywhere else.

The smoking lip, demonstrated with a lit cigarette

Left: The golden contact lens. Right: The chess set

Left: the dueling debutante gloves, filled with gold shot. Right: the articulated finger ring.

-Tiffany