Ten years ago, Sophie McKay was sitting at her kitchen table in Kentish Town tinkering with pieces of metal. After working for eight years as a ready-to-wear designer for luxury brands such as Versace, Tom Ford and Burberry, she was growing tired of the high-intensity environment and decided it was time to start something of her own.
“I’ve just always been really obsessed with jewellery,” she says, sharing how a pastime of hunting through her mother’s collections as a child evolved into scouring eBay for mid-century pieces as an adult. She launched Bar Jewellery – Bar is an acronym for Born from Ambition to create Responsibly, as well as a reference to all jewellery coming from a single bar of metal – as a means to jump off the hamster wheel and offer a slow fashion alternative to what was in the market. This year, the brand is celebrating a decade in business with several collections that celebrate McKay’s Scottish heritage and Bar’s London roots. The most recent, Horizon, is inspired by the continuous flow of the horizon in the English and Scottish countryside.
“I like the idea of transience,” says McKay about the new pieces. “I was thinking about smoke, flowing lines of light, just these intangible things. And I thought about how I could capture those shapes and [mould] them into something.”
Much of McKay’s work is centred around how the jewellery “flows with the lines of the body”, and she describes her design process as “intuitive” and “impulsive”. Working with skilled artisans, McKay turns recycled silver into twisted bracelets that gently coil around the wrist, necklaces that drape and cascade across the body like a piece of fabric, and gold-plated rings and ear cuffs that delicately cling to the skin like droplets of water.
McKay was working in the fashion industry during an era that celebrated maximalism and opulence, but her quiet, considered designs ended up earning her kudos from tastemakers such as Emma Watson and Meghan Markle. She recalls Watson enlisting an agency to vet Bar’s sustainability practices before she could wear any of the pieces and how Markle’s love for one of her bracelets resulted in a visit to her studio by a Japanese film crew. “Actually, most of my customer base is Japanese,” she says. “The Japanese appreciate the small details, so there’s definitely something [in my designs] that resonates with them.”
For her latest collection, which will launch in late spring, each piece of jewellery was inspired by stones found in different parts of Scotland. “There’s a very sweet man who’s been doing this for 30 years,” she says. “He used to have a shop at the top of a mountain where he’d sell gemstones. Now he’s retired and he just wanders around and picks up stones and cuts them and I pick what I want from his little treasure trove.” Though all the stones have been sourced in Scotland, she’s proud of the role her home city of London has played in not just this newest line, but in her brand’s entire journey. “I think the history of jewellery in London is so entrenched, so deep,” she says. Over the last decade, McKay has worked with casters in Islington, bought materials in Hatton Garden, cycled to Hackney to meet suppliers, and designed every piece in her home studio.
“I think it’s like a homecoming. I’ve been very focussed on Japan and [places] outside of the UK, but I really want to get back to the grassroots and what it means to be a British brand. I’d like to work more with London makers, work in my studio, and get back to the basics of what I love doing.”
BAR Jewellery
barjewellery.com
@barjewellery
Stocked at:
Pavement, 21 Orford Road, Walthamstow, E17 9NL
MinimuMaximuM, 200-222 High Street, Barnet, EN5 5SZ