Marie Lichtenberg’s Smash capsule turns a run-over locket into art

A locket flattened by a car became Marie Lichtenberg’s latest act of design alchemy. Smash is a five-piece capsule built around that accident, recasting her familiar pendant shape as if pressure itself had become part of the ornament.

The result is not a novelty so much as a sharpened reading of the house language she established in 2019. Marie Lichtenberg built her name on talismanic lockets, engraved words, colorful gemstones and enamel, often toggling between English and French phrases with a mix of tenderness and irreverence. Smash keeps that spirit intact, but alters the silhouette so the jewel looks compressed, dented and somehow more emotional for it.

That shift matters because the locket was never just a shape in this brand’s universe. A 2023 profile noted that the signature locket was based on an antique family heirloom, which gives Smash a meaningful internal logic: this is not a designer abandoning her code, but testing how much damage it can absorb and still feel like the same object. The flattened forms turn an inherited idea into something visibly weathered, as if memory itself had been pressed into metal.

Lichtenberg’s route into jewelry also explains why this capsule feels more like continuation than detour. She launched her eponymous line after a trip to India, where she discovered mauli, the blessed hand-woven thread associated with protection. That origin story still runs through the brand’s most recognizable pieces, including the Love You locket, the breakout design that took off after she posted it on Instagram. Smash extends that vocabulary of symbols and sentiment, while giving it a harder edge.

The official description frames the capsule as five deliberately flattened lockets created after a jewel was crushed by a car, “pressed, compressed, almost crushed under the weight of the times.” That phrasing captures what makes the series work: it treats accident as authorship. In a category often content to polish sentiment until it becomes generic, Lichtenberg has made the bruise part of the beauty.

There is also a family thread beneath the wit. Her mother’s Martiniquan roots influenced the brand’s use of symbolic chains and its emotional relationship to adornment, and that generational pull gives the smashed surface a deeper charge. Smash feels less like destruction than compression, a familiar form made denser, stranger and more collectible, with the same intimate pulse that has defined Marie Lichtenberg from the start.