Label to Love — Santangelo

A peripatetic lifestyle is often seen as the ultimate in bohemian glamour, and Anna Santangelo embodies this idea. The stylist and jewellery designer grew up in California, moved to Sydney as a teenager, and now lives between New York and Berlin. She’s moving to Brussels with her partner at the end of the year. “Eventually we’ll be setting up the studio there, which will be great,” she smiles. On a video call from her Berlin apartment, she wears a white T-shirt with a customised Kelba necklace from her brand, an enviably simple backdrop to a mane of dark hair and sunkissed skin.

Santangelo’s eponymous jewellery brand was founded in 2018 and is now loved for an aesthetic which combines natural materials, an eye for the detail to lift an outfit and the kind of high level references you might expect from a stylist who has worked with Marc Jacobs, i-D, Marfa Journal and Glossier. As the ‘about us’ page on the new site puts it, the brand is inspired by “club culture, surf movies and the natural world.” Bestsellers like the High On Hope silver necklace with cross or the Che Bomba earring with freshwater cornflake pearl are examples of that combination.

The way the brand itself came together was equally organic. “I never had the intention of doing a brand,” says Santangelo. Instead, she made a necklace for stylist Celestine Cooney who she was assisting at the time. A few months later, Cooney was working on the show for Preen and asked Santangelo if she wanted to do the jewellery. “I just very naively said yes to something that I didn’t really have the experience or qualifications for,” she laughs. “I had a trip to Portugal booked. I brought all these materials, had my tools confiscated at the airport, I made pieces in this Airbnb in 40 degrees in the middle of summer, and sent all this stuff to this fitting.” The items ended up on most of the models in the show. Another chance encounter followed: Santangelo’s flatmate wore a necklace to wear to work at Maryam Nassir Zadeh, and the founder spotted it. “That was the first stockist I had ever had.”

If her brand has the DNA of the by-the-ocean locations of Santangelo’s childhood, she says it’s grown up in 2025. “I don’t want it to always feel like its pigeon holed into this category of surfy jewellery,” she says. “What I design now is definitely a bit of a departure from the initial designs.” She says she is “trying to find that balance where you want it to still feel a bit playful.”

The brand’s new website – created by Santangelo’s sister Elise – showcases these new beautiful things, like the striking Lento ring, made from sections of smoky quartz, or the E Poi bracelet/necklace which looks like a Jean Arp sculpture worn on the wrist. It also gives space to collaborators (Santangelo has worked with brands and artists ranging from Proenza Schouler to Susan Cianciolo) and references, like the nineties club that inspired the High On Hope necklace. The text, meanwhile, is written by Durga Chew-Bose, who Santangelo connected with after her jewellery was used in Bonjour Tristesse.

“I buy probably 99% vintage, and the other 1% are small brands from friends, things that I truly connect to,” says Santangelo. “And so I think giving a little bit of that world, and thinking about why it is that I connect to the things that I do, is important.”

If the designs she creates have a pleasing simplicity to them, Santangelo is open about the fact that they do not come from a simple process. “Sometimes I sit for days in my studio and I won’t make anything that I like,” she says. “And then you get it, and then you’re like ‘oh, that’s right.” Part of this is down to the line that the pieces walk – one that has the charm of trinkets but remains elevated. “I think a lot of the materials that I use, or have used…it can [look] like a beach tchotchke [trinket] or whatever, but it’s twisting it a little bit, or reinterpreting materials in a slightly modern way,” she says. “I don’t know if I’m mastering it, but that at least what I’m trying to do.” Seven years on from that first fateful necklace, you’d say she was succeeding – with style.