Polly Wales and Castro Smith unveil one-of-a-kind layering jewels
Polly Wales and Castro Smith turned layering into a collector’s game, pairing cast gemstones with engraved creatures across 16 one-of-a-kind jewels.
Polly Wales and Castro Smith made layering feel less like a styling rule and more like a collector’s instinct. Their 16-piece one-of-a-kind fine jewelry capsule arrived through a digital preview on June 4, a Los Angeles pop-up at PWFJHQ on June 4 and 5, and a digital launch on June 5 at 6pm GMT, 10am PT, with pieces designed to be worn in combination rather than kept isolated as singular trophies.
What gives the collaboration its charge is the contrast at its core. Polly Wales, the Los Angeles design house known for its cast-not-set approach, works through lost-wax casting that lets molten gold settle around stones in an almost reckless-looking, but highly controlled, way. Castro Smith brings the opposite discipline from London: traditional apprenticeship, seal engraving, intaglio, and a visual language drawn from mythology, biology, and historical ornament. Put together, those signatures create jewels with both surface drama and structural depth, the kind of pieces that can sit beside one another on the body and still each hold their own.
The collection developed through a yearlong exchange of texts, voice notes, video calls, and in-person meetings, and that looseness shows in the objects themselves. Wales’ stones and Smith’s engraved creatures and nature motifs, including ants, birds, snakes, waves, blossoms, and other imagery, give the series a stacked, talismanic feel. One ring, the Slither design, reportedly grew from an unexpected handoff in which Wales set sapphires first and Smith interpreted them through his own lens. Smith said he wanted wearers to feel “like a pretty alien,” which captures the collection’s odd, alluring balance of elegance and strangeness.
The lineup leaned into formats that invite layering: signet rings, necklaces and padlock necklaces, with reported prices ranging from about $9,265 to $18,060. By the time the collection was covered on June 12, some pieces were already sold out, a sign that the appetite for highly individual fine jewelry remains strong when the work feels deeply authored. Wales’ own brand philosophy, rooted in the United Kingdom’s 1990s counterculture and rave scene, helps explain the collection’s restless energy. This is collector-crafted layering with personality first, polish second, and that is exactly why it reads as a style cue now.
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