For jewelry designer Rosh Mahtani, the quest to create modern heirlooms originated in her love of one of humanity’s greatest stories: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Growing up in Zambia before moving to London, her desire to express herself through a creative process brushed up against the outsider experience of the immigrant, and it took time to manifest as the destiny she was entitled to and could find a medium for. It was in a literature class at Oxford University that she discovered a sense of belonging in the Divine Comedy’s opening lines: which paint the picture of a young creative, lost in a dark wood, trying to find his way in the world.
This exploration of loneliness and personal identity led her to create her jewelry brand, Alighieri, from a desire to make others feel less alone, and more in touch with the unifying nature of our collective human experience across the ages. While Alighieri has gone on to become revered and sought out internationally, Rosh’s works are entirely manufactured in the UK. In 2020, Princess Anne presented the self-taught designer with the Queen Elizabeth the second Award for British Design, the first time this prestigious honor has been bestowed upon a designer of jewelry.
We discussed why the vulnerability of imperfection creates closeness, how artists can influence each other across time and media, and the romance of an individual’s relationship to objects, from a family’s “cave of treasures” to astronauts carrying talismans to space for luck and strength.
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