Sharp Objects

Jewellery designer Hannah Martin first met Joan Jett by accident, and by way of an ear piercing. Five years ago, at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles, Joan and Hannah were staying in the hotel when a mutual friend, stylist Maryam Malakpour, borrowed some of Hannah’s jewellery for Joan to try. She then asked the jeweller to piece the singer’s ear; despite not being a piercer, Hannah couldn’t help but oblige. From that point onward, Joan began wearing Hannah’s pieces. 

This friendship is now materialised as a collection, launching on the 12th of November to mark the 45th anniversary of Joan’s 1981 anthem, “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.” “It’s not been this big commercial brand-meets-artist thing,” says Hannah. “It’s been very organic: we all love each other, and we all appreciate each other’s art and style.” What began as plans for a single piece grew when the jeweller “immersed myself in Joan world for a week,” and produced countless more ideas.

Hannah’s usual method is to invent a muse and build a visual world around her with mood boards, but here her muse was real. The brief, though, was never to copy what Jett wore in her heyday. “That’s really boring, and anyone could do that,” Martin says. Instead she describes the result as “grown-up punk”: pieces that nod to the past but suit Joan now.

The collection began with a pacifier necklace. Joan bought a silver one on tour in Scandinavia in the 1980s, after stepping off a plane to find fans wearing real dummies, and wore it on stage and off for years, until it was eaten by a family dog. Martin’s version is a stack of sculptural orbs, and its stripped-back geometry, “essentially three circles with a teardrop on the bottom”, with Bauhaus in mind, set the visual language for everything else. It hangs from gig-style lanyards of leather and silver links, worn at the neck or wrapped round the wrist.

The most abstract piece is the Blackheart ring, named for Jett’s band of more than 40 years. Two sculptural teardrops sit together to read as a heart, set with reverse-set black diamonds. “I’m a very un-heart kind of person,” Martin admits. “I liked the conceptualness of it: what happens if you strip that shape right back and make it this really sculptural, beautiful thing?”

Elsewhere, the safety pin is abstracted into an elongated curve of silver, and a concert badge becomes a hand-painted enamel pin reading “Bad Reputation”.

Prices run from £300 to £19,000. Shop the collection here.