Emerging designer Nora Kogan of St. Kilda Jewelry has a rich background story that reads like a juicy Tolstoy novel. After spending her formative years wandering along the Black Sea in Odessa, at age ten Kogan and her family relocated to a small town outside of Rome, smuggling her mother's jewels across the border in a tiny transistor radio. A year later and they were on the move again to St. Kilda, a seedy seaside neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia, where artists, prostitutes and local aborigines collided in colorful results. Kogan's favorite pastime in her new hometown: sitting on her mother's bed and going through her bag of jewelry.

Flash forward more than a decade and Kogan, who was studying in a yeshiva in Tsfat, the Israeli town known as the birthplace of Kabbalah, realized that she wanted to become a jewelry designer. And so the well-traveled 20-something returned to Australia where she studied gold smithing at Northern Melbourne Institute of Technology. "I wanted to learn the technical aspects of making jewelry," she explains. "I don't believe you can design something without an intimate understanding of how it's constructed." After completing her degree, Kogan left for the States where she launched her career with a position at Me&Ro Jewelry.

Two years later she branched out on her own with St. Kilda Jewelry, and her delicate, earthy gold and silver bijoux were quickly snatched up by savvy magazine editors and boho-chic celebrities like Keri Russell. Feminine pieces in tough girl shapes (teeth, skulls, snakes), these timeless jewels are the product of an epic personal journey that spanned continents—a fact that only adds to their charming found-in-a-transistor-radio appeal!

St. Kilda Jewelry is available at Pivot, 1101 West Fulton Market, (312) 243-4754.

- Caroline Stanley

Similar Topics:accessories, Australia, fashion, shopping

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