Manhaz Collection: a Love Affair
After a long carrier in foreign policy, Manhaz Ispahani has founded Manhaz Collection in New York, a true point of reference for jewelry lovers
«The most immediate catalyst for starting Mahnaz Collection was that, in the mid-2000s, my engagement ring had a terrible accident. I spent the next year plus visiting jewelers all over, intensely looking for a replacement. I never found one, but my old love for jewelry was refreshed and a gallery emerged. The birth of my daughter also began to change the way I saw the world. Where I was raised, we had a culture of jewelry; it is almost in the DNA of women from South Asia and Iran. You are exposed to such extraordinary yellow gold work, and also gemstones - Burma rubies, Swat emeralds, Afghan lapis, Persian turquoise... I also travelled a lot for work in the decades before as international affairs and foreign policy executive, and I collected small sculptures everywhere, silver, miniatures, portable things, like jewelry. My focus is mid-late twentieth century European and American jewelry because I have lived in this world for forty years. My parents were both interested in European Modernism - in art and design. And my childhood home in Bangladesh was designed by an Italian modernist architect in the early 1960s. The early 1960s and 1970s are my passion period: for many reasons, there was such an explosion of innovation at that time. You can see it in Chaumet or Boucheron, and in the work of independent jewelers like Andrew Grima, Wendy Ramshaw, Charles Loloma. About Giorgio Facchini, he has been an early exponent of kinetic jewel...»
