Livia Lazzari, Jewelry as an Expression of Self

Can you tell us something about the speech you gave during the Trendvision talk at Vicenzaoro last Saturday?

It was a valuable opportunity to talk about the Voodoo Jewels project, a creative universe that we have been passionately cultivating for years. I entitled my talk “A Dirty Travel Around Imperfect Beauty” because the central theme was precisely imperfection, the core of Voodoo Jewels' philosophy. For us, imperfection is a true strength, an ode to the freedom to be oneself. Voodoo Jewels is a modern apologia for imperfection: through our creations, we want to encourage everyone to authentically develop their own identity, away from standards and conventions.

How can jewelry be a tool for cultural and personal expression these days?

Jewelry has always had one main function: a means of cultural and personal expression. Historically, the purpose of every piece of jewelry created was to communicate the social status, role, and cultural identity of the wearer. The big difference is that, while in the past those roles and identities were often imposed or inherited, we now have the freedom to choose. The wearer of a piece of jewelry can decide what message to convey, who they want to be, and what they intend to communicate.

This change has transformed jewelry into a powerful tool capable of reflecting an individual freedom that cannot be underestimated. In this sense, design takes on a political value. We can no longer afford to create meaningless objects, soulless replicas that are lost in an already saturated market. Our world needs authentic narratives, objects that speak of values, choices, and identity. I firmly believe that design must respond to this need because, only in this way, can we make a real contribution in a global context that is, now more than ever, in search of direction.

What do you love about contemporary jewelry and its value? And what do you think has been lost and should be recovered?

I think that, in relation to the fashion hemisphere, the contemporary jewelry scene is truly vibrant and full of possibilities. It is a creative territory where you can break patterns, experiment, and generate innovative forms of expression. However, the jewelry design industry, in its more traditional sense, often tends to follow fashion rather than impose its own distinctive vision.

What I don’t like is seeing how fashion is frequently the driving force behind this relationship. Many ready-to-wear brands have created iconic jewelry, trends that the jewelry design world immediately began to pursue by producing copies of copies. This attitude ends up impoverishing research and limiting the sector’s creative potential. I think that jewelry design should be more daring instead. It should go beyond its own limits and invest in research to redefine trends itself. Only then can it establish its own strong identity and contribute significantly to the contemporary landscape.

How do you see the interaction between body and jewelry evolving in the future?

I like to imagine a future in which people go back to adorning themselves more and more as a means of self-expression, to show their uniqueness through jewelry. It would be wonderful to witness a kind of tribal opulence, where every adornment becomes a personal and distinctive symbol that can make us all different from one another.