'I had been talking about doing my own thing for twenty years already,' reflects Kia Schwaninger, the founder and creative director of Kia Schwan. She has recently launched the Color Rhythms collection, vividly articulating the power of memory, palette and architecture, elegantly proposing the case for carved stones. The road to launching her line seems somewhat predestined. ;Like many small children I started with making bead necklaces,' she shares, before a trip to Ecuador as a teenager and the chance to apprentice in a jewellery workshop indicated that beyond the childhood hobby, lay an undeniable gift; 'I was taught the basics of metalsmithing, and just had fun for three months making jewellery, hammering and bending metal into shape.'
Schwaninger’s preternatural talent was honed at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied Jewellery Design, which was followed by an internship at Tiffany, where some of her designs actually went into production. Roles at Van Cleef & Arpels, first in their Paris atelier before leading their customisation team in New York and latterly as design director for Harry Winston cemented her position as a jewellery professional in the truest sense. It could have been easy to remain a senior distiller of ideas for jewellery behemoths, but as Schwaninger explains, 'I felt like I had been dreaming of creating a collection that would represent me fully, so that was how Colorhythms came to be.'
