A trained jeweler and designer, Italian Orlando Orlandini worked for a commercial jewelry company for close to 20 years, ultimately becoming the design director. When he decided in the early 1980’s to go out on his own, it was to further explore gold, a medium he cherishes and respects. His father was a sculptor and his mother painted watercolors, so it seems likely he inherited an artistic gene and he was eager to express it. He knew he wanted to experiment with new ways to manipulate gold, to express his imagination. Based just outside Florence where he works with his entire family (wife, son, and daughter), he maintains a workshop where nearly all the company’s œuvre is hand fabricated by a corps of master goldsmiths. Many pieces are produced in limited editions, numbered, and signed by their jeweler-makers.
He is fascinated by gold — and most of his line is gold, with accents of diamonds, pearls, and occasional stones — and what can be done with it, how it can be sculpted, molded, transformed. Many of his pieces appear to be knit, crocheted, or woven with the thinnest of golden filaments, as if spun cotton candy. His pieces have a flexibility and a hand to them like a lush fabric. He has even made capes of gold that drape and undulate like a textile. He is not interested in creating classic bangle bracelets, charms for necklaces, or cocktail rings. If he were to manufacture these items, they would be so distinctly fabricated and formed in his inimitable style, so completely different from anything available already in the marketplace, that it is likely you would not likely dub them a bangle, a charm, or a cocktail ring.
