At first glance, Vram Minassian’s jewellery seems audacious, arresting. Few of his rings can be worn while using your hands for any utility. His signature Echo ring has perhaps the most potential to catch the eyes of passersby, as well as your clothes, hair, and handbag. The ring can be worn in two positions, ‘erect’, with its two peaks pointing upward, and recumbent, flipped on its side so the peaks hug the adjacent fingers.
But looking closer, Minassian’s pieces are gently imbued with delicate detail, redolent of the natural world, which speaks to the designer’s reverence for and commitment to the idea of continuity.
“Nature is a tool to continuity, a rhythm, a reminder of forces unseen,” says Minassian, on the phone from his atelier on Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles’ storied shopping street. “I don’t care about flowers. The message I’m trying to send is that life exists on a continuum. I was able to find continuity despite my mutated heart and soul; I was able to find my wife and find continuity, just as bare trees burst into leaf, flower, and fruit, when winter becomes spring.”
Much like his personality, beneath a bold, brassy exterior there is a more intuitive, gentle interior life to many of his pieces. There’s the thick gold ring, whose petals appear to be parting to reveal a blossom of diamonds. Or a collection including a brash, big set of rings, a necklace, and a bracelet wrought to look like a cluster of small pebbles, clinging together.
Pieces from Minassian’s standout couture collection, while generally flamboyant, also evoke a sense of depth that one doesn’t usually associate with pieces of jewellery. Many of his pieces are large, stretching across entire knuckles, which of course enlarges the canvas he has to work with. But in many cases, surface are covered with impossibly tiny pavé mosaics of stones which make you feel you’re looking into something immeasurably deep. Each stone is a slightly different colour than its neighbour, invoking, in the case of a blue-green peridot stunner of a ring, a sense of shimmering, deep ocean water. A round pendant with a mosaic of tiny orange, red, and yellow stones, shot through with gold wisps, conjures an endless desert vista.
Similarly, sets of earrings and rings in the Couture collection feature bursts of stones on uneven or even smoothly recessed surfaces. The unexpected recession of stones adds to the surprising sense of depth.
Born in Beirut to Armenian parents to a father who was a well-known jeweller in Gilded Age 1950s and 60s Hamra, Vram was put on the path to a life based around beautiful objects — and people. “My father’s store was at the centre of Hamra,” says Minassian. “All the most glamorous women of Ras Beirut, politicians, doctors, intellectuals, would all come to his store. I thought: ‘if being in the jewellery business could get me beautiful women, I’m in!’”
After emigrating to the US and studying jewellery design in Los Angeles, Minassian founded a business in 1985 that for over two decades serviced other jewellery designers, bringing their projects to life with materials he sourced and labour he supervised. That all changed when a vision for the Echo ring came to him in a dream, shortly after the birth of his daughter in 2015, when he founded Vram Jewellery, in what he calls his ‘second act’. “My entire first collection derived from the one idea of Echo,” he says, with reverence. “With Echo, the only message I’m sending is to be true to oneself, to take away all the unnecessary parts.”
The move has proven to be a smart one: the fearless jeweller won the 2018 Couture Design Award for best debut and was runner up at the 2019 Town & Country Jewelry Awards, and Vram Jewellery, which is all produced in Minassian’s own Beverly Hills workshop, is now sold at top retailers, including Moda Operandi and Bergdorf Goodman.
