Nov 17, 2021

Extra-Ordinary

Introducing the Sienna Patti x Apply Set (Fall 2021)

While they might not look like it on first blush, jewelry & stickers are related. When you hear the word “jewelry,” luxurious metals, precious stones, and careful craftsmanship come to mind. Before Apply, stickers were anything but this. Hold a sheet from our limited edition collaboration with Sienna Patti, however, and things will glint & glimmer.

Jewelry has long been a source of inspiration for us at Apply. Growing up in a jewelry studio which celebrated “costume” - often bombastic - pieces made from common materials at accessible prices, we were raised to believe it was for everyone anytime. Apply products are special. While they feature art in extraordinary material expressions, like jewelry, they’re thoughtfully designed to be used & “worn” - building upon their sticker roots. With this in mind, about a year ago, we released Jewelry Box - a sheet full of 26 museum-grade pieces fashioned from gold & precious stones, but ready to glam your things.

In Sienna, we found someone similarly interested in bringing fine art into real life. She runs an influential gallery in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where she represents the most exciting & talented artists making jewelry from around the world. We first got to know her more than a decade ago, when she was a visiting critic of our very own Sam Mapp’s, in graduate school, and have since bonded over our shared interests.

Sienna views jewelry as versatile - not confined by materials, use cases, or traditional notions of value. It’s part art - something to be looked at with marvel. It’s part fashion - something to be worn, performatively. And - it’s fun! It doesn’t hang on a wall or sit (for long) on a pedestal. It sits on us & makes us better - like stickers!

Stickers are a natural extension of Sienna’s world - expansive with possibility. Our collaboration includes three limited edition sticker sheets, made dually in partnership with a few remarkable female artists that she represents: Lola Brooks, Märta Mattsson and Mallory Weston. Each of them, in their own way, challenges traditional expectations of jewelry, while remaining relatable in their iconography: Hearts, Wings, and Smilies.

Hearts: Lola attended SUNY New Paltz, and received a BFA Jewelry & Metals, studying with the same faculty as Sam. She currently lives and works in Athens, GA, where her practice is divided between her bench jewelry (fine jewelry) and art jewelry. For more than 10 years she’s focused on the common symbol of a heart, ever present in its many incarnations across digital culture, social media and jewelry. Saccharine, but also sexy, Lola has often made her hearts large and sculptural, fabricated from a variety of materials; most recently (and seen here) in stainless steel chain with glass eyes, adding a Surrealist twist.

Wings: Living & working in Stockholm, Sweden, Märta is an unconventional jeweler, whose work elicits awe & wonder. She turns insect wings into earrings, necklaces & brooches by preserving them with resin and augmenting them with lacquer, pigments & precious metals. We arranged her stickers to look like a specimen box, mirrored as if a Rorschach Blot (which often resembles butterfly wings). Peel these incredible metallic stickers & Reveal a portrait of the drag artist, Philipp Basener, wearing her jewelry, in a piece titled MIMICRY, 2021.

Dream On: Mallory received an MFA in Jewelry & Metals from RISD & is currently an Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. Her work takes many hybrid forms, combining digital information with traditional craft methods. In these stickers, we focused on her series called Multiples, that’s centered on transforming symbols from sticker culture - smileys, hearts, aliens, etc. - into beautiful pieces of jewelry. We’ve turned her jewelry back into stickers.

Each of the three sticker sheets are from an edition of 400. On Giving Tuesday, all sales of products from our collaboration will be donated to the Center for Reproductive Rights, in support of the women that we all have depended on to bring us into the world.