Taste is everywhere, vision is rare
Jewelry, bags, shoes, tees, street style and more
Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.
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This is Part Two of Concorde’s coverage from our recent trip to Paris for men’s fashion week. (Part One is here.) Don’t be fooled by the name: Every year there’s more and more women’s fashion to be found there, and today we’ve got intel on bags, shoes, tees and jewelry — plus some select street-style inspiration for the ladies & fellas alike.
Let’s get to it —
There was one person I (Erin) was especially stoked to meet in Paris: the brilliant young jewelry designer Zoé Mohm. I interviewed Zoé at the beginning of the year and, as I noted back then, in a very short time, she has developed a singular, signature style and stuck to it. No one is making jewelry like her.
Do you know how rare that is these days? She’s not cherry-picking from references on IG. She’s not ripping off Elsa Peretti or Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe or Alexander Calder. She’s an artist who’s been able to stay true to her funky vision — who else is carving found deer antler like it’s ivory?? It’s the difference between having taste and having vision. (Don’t forget we all need a splash of bad taste.) And she makes everything herself in her apartment, though when we met she told me she recently put her boyfriend to work. 😉
What Zoé is doing is so special that she’s amassed fangirls. When I told one of my most sophisticated friends I was planning to meet her, she gushed, “she’s the absolute coolest.” Meeting Zoé in person, for coffee at Dreamin Man in Paris, confirmed that this was indeed the case.
Zoé showed up wearing an embroidered Dries Van Noten skirt, worn ballet flats and a gothic black top she cinched in the front using one of her own pins (above left). She’d clipped a woven silver barrette into her hair that she designed and made for Rier’s Spring 2026 collection (above right). She carried a woven-leather Dragon Diffusion bag in which she’d nestled a round wicker basket full of one-of-one pieces from her archive that she wanted to show me.
When we sat down she took a gingham cloth bag from the wicker basket and proceeded to pull out piece after piece, until a jewelry case worth of her work was arranged on the café table in front of us.
“I’ve been working more with precious materials,” she told me as she showed off a ring carved from elk horn that she’d dotted with rose cut diamonds on gold pedestal settings (inset above bottom left). I told her I don’t personally like diamonds, and she agreed that she only likes them when they “look irregular.” Some of her favorite examples are the “salt and pepper diamonds” on the domed silver ring closest to her fingertip in the image above bottom right.
Fine jewelry materials have been more on her mind after receiving some commissions for engagement rings. That’s what birthed the huge Dravite (a brown tourmaline) “set in fine gold on a puffy square silver cushion” modeled on her finger above.
I love her use of found elk horn and deer antler, which the animals shed naturally after breeding season. She carves these into rings, polishes them until they feel smooth as marble, then inlays them with sapphire “daisies,” inset above, or milky jade surrounded by silver spikes (on her index finger above).
And I’ve never seen a ring like the one she made from a big honking nut she picked up in Cambodia, where her mom is from (inset above left). She lopped off one side of the nut, revealing its innards geode-style, then studded it with diamond and citrine.
Zoé studied textiles (she’s a self-taught jeweler), and told me that back in school she “wanted to make the textile that they embroidered on. I wanted to make every piece.” She takes that approach with metal: for instance, she takes a sheet of silver, hammers it into a hollow bangle (pictured above bottom right) and then, using silver wire, she embroiders it with silver beads — each of which she makes by hand, too. You see it again in her basket-weave chains, which she works on during metro rides — she’s holding up one such work in progress in the picture above middle right. She weaves the silver into rope necklaces, a few of which are still available at NYC’s Old Jewelry (which is where I was able to snag a pair of her earrings earlier this year).
Although her lead time for commissions has doubled since I interviewed her — it’s now 8 months — she’s open to requests, and is working on an easier-to-reproduce collection for store buyers.
Besides preparing exhibition pieces for great galleries like Zurich’s Suns.Works and NYC’s Jacqueline Sullivan, Zoé is also continuing her collaborations with Cristaseya and Rier and working on some pieces for Viola Lovely in Boston (part of the wave of stores with no ecomm).
You can find Zoé Mohm on IG here.
Here’s the handbags, shoes, tees and street fashions I clocked in Paris —
The coolest handbags I spotted — at a runway show, on the sidewalk, and from a Paris-based leathersmith who makes everything by hand — all have the same shape in common: