Vintage Fashion for the Modern Girl
November 9, 2013
When I first saw Pamela at a fashion show with her stop-dead-in-my tracks tousled, earthy mane of hair, Peruvian-inspired poncho, mixed with some rock and roll black leather pants, I knew that I had to get up the nerve to do my Trove schpiel and get her for this site (and this was before I became aware of her looks-like-you-got-it-on-an-archeological-dig-in-Mexico jewelry—I wanted it all!).
True to what I expected, when I came to do this interview, Pamela fueled my love for her kind of ’70s, natural, indigenous and eclectic style. Her clothes are unaffected perfection, whether in her vintage, floor-length Diane Freis hippie dress (I have been chasing after one for myself ever since) or in her Southwestern chunky cardigan and jeans. However, her curation of jewels, both ones that she has created and those she has picked up, is a virtual exhibit of her taste for authenticity and cultural mythology. Pamela’s fascination with archetypal, raw imagery permeates in her iconic claw bangles, raven skull necklaces, eagle talon earrings, and oversized crosses that she makes and equally, in everything she collects, from the geo ring she found at the airport to the Native American children’s arrow one.
Pamela Love
Spring 2012 Jewelry Collection
Pamela’s obsession with collecting does not end on her limbs – her apartment is an expose of her intense attraction to “curating.” (She says that when she was a child, she developed a compulsion to unite corresponding or like objects). Today, she lives amongst an explosion of fossils, crystals, afterlife iconography, and scientific and medical imagery (her dad was a surgeon) – it is an environment that reflects her originality and gives insight into the innerworkings of the mind of a creative virtuoso. Pamela’s jewelry resonates with a kind of shamanic thinking that drives her to spend the majority of her time “uncontrollably” making it. Each piece is a keeper, a collector’s item, it’s the kind that belongs to you.
“You can buy fashion. You can’t buy style,” the designer Pamela Love has been known to say. “It’s all about how you wear it and how you feel in what you wear.”Her unique style, a blend of masculine and feminine, hippie and grunge, set Love apart from the crowd even before she started her jewelry line.
Although she was born in Brooklyn, Love spent most of her formative years in southern Florida. She was always ambitious, even as a girl—and always dressed to her own drummer. As a girl, she told Vogue in 2011, she wanted to be a painter, writer, rock star, astrophysicist, archaeologist, clothing designer, and sculptor (“everything apart from a movie star!”). A self-described tomboy, she ejected the heart-shaped stickers and pink-stone necklaces popular with her elementary-school peers and created her own art around the house. “I collaged chairs in my room. I collaged my Doc Martens. I had this briefcase that I carried around, I collaged that. Everything I owned was deco-collaged with magazines and then varnished.” Later, at New York University, she studied fine arts and film. After graduating, she became an assistant to the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, who encouraged her to apply her aesthetic instincts to something tangible. Comfortable working with her hands, she took his advice and launched her jewelry collection, Pamela Love.
“My jewelry is very multicultural and heavily based on tradition and the different perspectives of body ornamentation from around the world; a touch of Mexico, Native America, Africa, and India.”
Jewelry from Pamela Love's current collection
“A lot of my inspiration comes from my travels across America, and particularly the Southwest,” she told a reporter in 2010. “My jewelry is very multicultural and heavily based on tradition and the different perspectives of body ornamentation from around the world; a touch of Mexico, Native America, Africa, and India.” Forged in sterling silver, black bronze, gold, and copper, the naturalistic eagle claws and bird skulls captured the media’s attention immediately. “Everyone says I’m morbid. . . . I don’t see it as a dark thing, I think it’s a positive thing! When you can face your own death, you can live to your fullest.”
After being spotlighted on the necks and wrists of models in Vogue and V, Love’s rather gothic pieces have gained popularity from Manhattan to Paris (where they’re sold at Colette) and Hong Kong (available at the local outpost of the French boutique Maria Luisa). She remains dedicated to creating every piece by hand. “Jewelry is totemic, talismanic,” she told Vogue in 2010. “I shower with it, sleep with it, live with it. I never take mine off.”
"I think the most interesting part of fashion is when people make things their own. I don’t know if I will ever design clothing though. I’m really focused on the jewelry."
Pamela love jewelry
At right. Photograph by Norman Jean Roy
Pamela answers a few of Trove’s questions:
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