Yahoo News Queen Elizabeth II Award: Rosh Mahtani on building her cult brand Alighieri and the power of her pieces
Rosh Mahtani, of cult jewellery brand Alighieri, followed in the footsteps of Bethany Williams and Richard Quinn this week to become the latest recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design. She celebrated by bringing friends and family, stylists and editors — and Princess Anne, who awarded the prize — into the depths of a Hatton Garden crypt.
Lit by candles, a stone’s throw away from where the brand began, Alighieri’s AW20 presentation, Love in the Wasteland, began. Inspired by TS Eliot’s poem The Wasteland, it set out to remind the audience of the power of connection. Afterwards, guests were given blank paper inside a pre-stamped envelope, with a call to arms: “Write a letter to someone you’ve lost touch with.”
It’s a plea close to the 30-year-old designer’s heart. “We’re so connected in terms of proximity and technology, but I think we’re more disconnected than ever. Hordes of people flow over London Bridge but they don’t connect. For me it was the idea of trying to find connection in that environment.”
The collection has huge personal resonance for Mahtani. When she launched the brand in 2014, “it was a particularly difficult time. I’ve not really talked about it before, but I was struggling with depression and my dad had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was in a really dark hole. Added to that, I had this feeling of, what do I do now? I was comparing myself to other people. I had friends who were management consultants or writers and doctors and I just didn’t know what to do.”
Without a plan, Mahtani enrolled in a one-day wax carving course. “I’ve always loved jewellery and ever since I was a kid I’ve been collecting things — shells, stones, bit of old wire — and putting them on chains. I wanted to try to make something from scratch.”
After the course, she took her wax templates to a Hatton Garden casters and had them made in gold. It’s from these early experiments that Mahtani went on to make her first collection, which incorporated her love of Dante (Mahtani studied French and Italian Literature at Oxford University).
She describes Dante as “my safety blanket when I’m sad”, while creating with wax “felt like finding my language for the first time”.
Mahtani often receives messages from customers about the power of her pieces. A terminally ill mother bought her son a lion medallion, one of Alighieri’s bestsellers, as a final gift to give him courage for when she was no longer there.
A girl gifted the same piece to her best friend after her break-up. “It sounds dramatic but creating this brand is the thing that really saved me,” she says. “Hearing people’s stories and making these pieces, which are really manifestations of a time I was going through, and having other people then tell me their stories, it gives me such strength.”
While Alighieri has now evolved into a multi-million pound business, with a celebrity fan base that includes Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the fundamentals remain the same. She uses the same casters and everything is manufactured and produced locally. “It’s about staying firm to what you believe in.”
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