What Four Decades in Fashion Taught Me About Wearing Jewelry

Wearing jewelry is a decision made every morning about how you want to be perceived by others that day.

My mother used to wait until I was in bed before she brought out her sewing machine.

She would sew our holiday clothes, pieces for herself, things she had imagined and was bringing into existence with her hands. I was supposed to be asleep, but my curiosity was too great. I would sneak out and watch her, completely transfixed – the way something flat and formless became, under her hands, a thing you could wear. A thing that changed how you looked. To me it was magic.

For my fifth birthday she gave me my own sewing kit. I still have most of those tools in my studio today. Now in my 50’s I realize how important that little sewing kit had been in the grand scope of my creative existence.

From that kit and a bag of fabric remnants my mother kept in the storage room, I made clothes for my Barbie dolls.

By the time I was eight I was making things for real people. My first attempt was an outfit for my cousin – two discarded pant legs turned into a kind of overall jumper, held together with mismatched buttons. It was not technically wearable. I certainly don’t think my Aunt let my cousin set foot out of the house wearing it, but it was a good attempt at using my creative skills for a purpose.

I understood, at eight years old, that making something to wear was one of the most interesting things a person could do.

It took the next four decades to fully understand why.

The Why arrived slowly, in layers.

It arrived through a Barbie coloring book my mother gave me – Barbie Goes to Europe – where I didn’t just fill in the colors but elaborated the clothes, added details, made them more interesting, not knowing that this was somehow foretelling my future. It arrived through design studies in California, through modeling from the age of thirteen, through the moment I stepped off a plane in Europe at eighteen for the first time and felt, with complete certainty, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

It arrived most fully in the showrooms and fitting rooms of some of the most extraordinary luxury fashion houses in Europe, where I spent decades learning the industry from the inside. Not as a designer – as a manager. As the person standing across from the client, watching her decide. Watching her try something on and either shrink slightly or stand a little taller. Watching the precise moment when something fit not just her body but her sense of herself.

You learn things in retail fashion that you cannot learn anywhere else.

You learn, for instance, that the client who comes back is never the one you sold the most to. She is the one you listened to most carefully. The one you brought exactly the right thing for, even if it was only one thing, even if it was the least expensive thing in the room. Because she left feeling seen – and that feeling is not something she forgets.

You learn that what people wear is never just what they wear. It is a decision made every morning about how they want to move through the world that day. About who they are, or who they are becoming, or who they are finally ready to stop pretending not to be.

And you learn this most clearly when you step inside a woman’s closet.

For years I worked as an image consultant, and the closet was always where the real conversation began. Not the surface conversation – the real one. A person’s closet tells you who they were, who they are now, and where the gap between those two things has opened up. I could see the clothes from a decade ago that no longer fit the life she was living. The things bought in hope and never worn. The safe choices, made over and over, by a woman who was capable of so much more than safe.

That gap between who she was and what she thought she was allowed to look like is the most interesting space I know. It is where my image consulting work lived. And it is, I’ve come to understand, where my jewelry lives too.

Because a piece of mine is not a safe choice. It was never intended to be and I know that it isn’t for everyone. It is for the woman who is ready to close that gap. Who is ready to wear something that says, without any ambiguity, exactly who she is.

She already knows who that is. She just needed the right thing to make it visible.

Lisa Marie Armstrong makes one-of-a-kind wearable art jewelry from her studio on Lake Zurich. Each piece is built from real stones and worked by hand — made once, never repeated.