Founded by Rosh Mahtani a decade ago, Alighieri quickly won a cult following and, in 2020, became the first jewellery brand to win the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design. Without formal training, Mahtani turned to jewellery-making during a dark personal time, setting herself the project of carving 100 pieces – one for each canto of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (c. 1321). Named after the Tuscan poet, the line today remains hand carved and crafted with a perfectly imperfect aesthetic, emphasizing texture and character. Made only from recycled metals, many pieces have an encrusted, archaeological feel, seemingly shaped by time and fate: and, as what the brand calls ‘modern heirlooms’, they are intended to weather passage through future generations.
Unsurprisingly, given this origin story, a strong spiritual current runs through Alighieri: based on a moment in Inferno, the brand’s Lion medallion is intended as a talisman to give its wearers courage (Mahtani refers to those who wear it as ‘the Lion Club’). At a talk during Frieze Week Los Angeles 2022, the designer reflected on the connection between the supernatural and customs of self-care, noting that, particularly for people of colour, ‘taking care of yourself is something that, for some centuries now, has been denied to certain people. So, the ways that these processes for this group usually worked was in magical or spiritual terms.’
This year, Mahtani launched ‘Alighieri Casa’, a collection of home accessories. With curvy and spiked cutlery inspired by traditional hunting tools from southern Africa (Mahtani was raised as a child in Zambia) to ingot-like dishes, the collection is, like Alighieri jewellery, ideal for mixing and matching. The striking Lion Paw Candlestick, which bulges out and tapers to a gently extended ‘foot’, harks back to the lion medallion, and its invocations of boldness and encounter.
Candles have a particular significance for Mahtani, whose Indian parents lit them at the start of prayers, and who identifies the Alighieri brand as rooted in a moment seated at her mother’s kitchen table, beside a candle brought back from Rome. She still keeps a
candle in the centre of the room when she works, she observed during the talk, ‘to almost say to myself: okay, back to the candle, everything else needs to quiet down.’ This new collection is an opportunity to reinvest the everyday with a little ritual.
This article originally appeared in Frieze Week, London magazine 2024 with the title ‘Human Rites’.
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Main Image: Alighieri Casa collection, 2024. Photography: Clover Green.
