Santangelo
SANTANGELO
February 28, 2025
SANTANGELO’s founder, Anna Santangelo, balances her work as a stylist with running her own jewelry project. These practices inevitably influence each other and sometimes merge into one.
After working together and establishing a strong connection, we invited her to design and produce a jewelry capsule for our SS25 show in Paris. This was a special commission, as the pieces had to generate ASMR sounds. SANTANGELO’S creative universe effortlessly merged with the brand’s vision.
She recently spoke with us about her artistic practice, her unexpected journey into jewelry design, her sources of inspiration, and elaborated on how she experienced this collaboration.
How would you define your practice?
My practice is raw and intuitive. SANTANGELO is very personal to me. I've worked as a stylist for a long time, and starting the jewelry brand came about very unintentionally. About six years ago, a stylist I was working with asked me to design all the jewelry for a fashion show. I had no formal jewelry training and had never designed jewelry before, but I was open to the opportunity. I am completely self-taught. I have learned through talking, listening, watching, and working with other people. There has been a lot of failure along the way. I needed to develop my own techniques and find the materials that spoke to me. There’s still so much I don’t know and am still learning, but I try to be patient with myself.
I come from styling, and I naturally think in terms of visuals and storytelling. I am interested in color, shape, texture, and how you can manipulate forms to create something beautiful in an unexpected way. My approach to my jewelry design is deeply influenced by this mindset. I encourage playful styling with the jewelry that I design. I enjoy thinking about how a piece translates in an image, how it will interact with clothes and bodies, or the many different ways that you could wear it. The same piece could be a belt, a necklace, or an anklet. It depends on how each person interprets it. There's an element of interaction and playfulness in the pieces, but the practice itself feels raw and intuitive. I spend my time taking in influences, references, inspiration, and sourcing different materials. Before designing a collection, I immerse myself in images and materials. I keep all of them out on my desk for weeks until I understand the story I want to tell.
I have no formal education in jewelry design, and much of my process is driven by gut instinct and intuition. My background as a stylist has shaped how I create, and I embrace that. For me, styling is about finding different elements and understanding how they exist together to create something new, and I think of designing in that way too.
The Domingo necklace freshwater Keshi pearl, Japanese glass beads and sterling silver hardware.
Details of Riverstone; creamy and marbled stone mined from riverbeds and then carved into spiral pendants.
Lento rings; smoky quartz and mother of pearl shell and Croatian blue glass and mother of pearl.
How was your path into the fashion industry as a stylist?
I'm trying to remember because I don’t think I was into fashion at university. I grew up in Southern California and Australia, surrounded by surf brands, but I never had a strong interest in fashion. It wasn’t planned, and I didn’t study it. I’ve worked in fashion for 14 years, since my early 20s. Before that, I played a lot of soccer and was interested in sports medicine and physiotherapy, so I studied anatomy at university.
A good friend of mine at the time was a photographer, and we started doing little shoots and projects together. One thing led to another—it all started very unintentionally. I was obsessed with eBay, constantly searching for clothes and collecting pieces, which probably explains why I gravitated toward styling. Back then, I didn’t even know what a stylist was.
Australia has a small fashion industry, which allowed me space to grow. Because we're so far from the rest of the world, we don’t have access to everything, so you learn to work with what you have. I started assisting other stylists, then eventually worked independently after moving to New York.
I then met someone in Australia when I first got into fashion. A slightly older couple had opened a shop in Sydney, and I found it accidentally on the side street. I was walking past and saw a guy smoking outside his garage, and I could see clothes inside. I went up, and I started speaking to him. It wasn't even a proper store, but inside, he had pieces from Margela's first collection, old Raf Simmons, old Jun Takahashi –all of these brands that I didn't know about. I remember he pulled out this book, which was about the Antwerp Six. That was my first fashion education. I became friends with him and his partner, a Japanese woman who worked with Issey Miyake in Japan. I would always visit them, buy pieces from them, learn more about designers, and become obsessed. I started collecting archive and vintage pieces, which I still do today. That was the start of my education, but I never went to school for that. It was just my own personal investigation.
Margiela's First Show, Spring 1989
How does not having a formal education in jewelry making and design affect your work?
It’s both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes, I get frustrated because there are so many techniques I want to learn. But at the same time, not being bound by traditional rules gives me more freedom to explore different ways of making things. My approach is raw and experimental. And I think there’s something valuable in that.
Reina Mop
The brand Santangelo has strong imagery. Can you elaborate a bit more on the project and its identity?
SANTANGELO is a personal project. It taps into what I know, my experiences, and the environments I grew up in. I was born in Southern California and then moved to the coast of Australia. The ocean has always been present in my life. I've spent my whole life swimming in the ocean, and the sea feels purifying and powerful for me. I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s. I was always around the beach, doing junior life-saving and wearing Roxy and Quicksilver. I’d go to school wearing shells and beaded necklaces. That nostalgia is embedded in the brand, as some of the materials I use are reminiscent of what I wore as a kid.
People who wear my jewelry have told me that it feels very personal and nostalgic and that elements of my designs feel familiar to them. That’s such meaningful feedback. I love the idea that my pieces resonate with others. When I wear my jewelry in winter, it feels like carrying a little piece of summer. I'm from these beach climates and now live in Berlin and New York, where they have hard winters. It's so lovely to feel I'm wearing this little talisman that keeps me near the ocean. It makes me feel close to home.
Santangelo SS24: ODE TO ANA
Shot by Romain Duquesne in Marseille this summer, 2023
How many people are behind Santangelo, working at the studio?
Danielle Sala is my right hand. She'sbeen there since the very beginning when I was making things in my living room. We produce everything handmade to order. So, she works in New York at the studio, and I work in our Berlin studio. Sometimes, depending on the season, we work with freelancers, but we mostly handle everything in-house.
This collaboration with paloma wool came with a specific request: sound. You had to meet the brief, fit into the brand’s collection, and stay true to Santangelo's identity simultaneously. How was this process?
The ASMR brief was an exciting starting point for designing, and thought it was such an interesting concept to work around. I had to think about designing pieces that looked beautiful but also fulfilling this brief of making sounds while being worn. The first step was trying the materials we had. I was also sourcing secondhand and antiques that we could incorporate in. I would try things out in the studio and think: ‘That's an awful sound,’ or ‘That's annoying’. I also had to consider how the jewelry would sound in a runway setting. It was interesting to discover the things that worked and the others that didn't. Beyond the sound, I had to ask myself: ‘How does it fit in the world of SANTANGELO?’. And then: ‘How does it speak to the world of paloma wool?’. That's why collaborations are so interesting. You need to find the marriage between the two.
We also incorporated leftover materials from the collection, which felt meaningful to tie the project together. The Samba belts were fun because they can be worn as belts, bracelets, or necklaces. The Reina Mop body piece was a new experiment, and I loved how it turned out on the runway.
We also incorporated leftover material from the collection. I have always loved the idea of repurposing materials, and it was a nice way to tie the project together. The Samba belts are fun because you can wear them as a belt, around the wrist, or necklace, these are playful pieces. The Reina Mop was super fun to make. The process was quite experimental as I'd never done anything like this before. I thought it looked beautiful in the show. I also love the Espiral Bracelet. I can't remember if it was Emily or Paloma, but we had this idea of creating something super long. It had such a beautiful effect to drag the pearls on the ground. It’s beautiful how the pearls all sit irregularly and not perfectly straight. They look like a trail of tears when they catch the light.
Romain Duquesne shot the collaboration campaign. You’ve also worked with him and paloma wool before. Can you talk about the creative tandem you two share?
Romain is one of my best friends. We've been working together for 10 years. It’s so great to find somebody who's your creative other half. I love building relationships with people because you start to intuitively understand how you work.
He is an integral part of SANTANGELO and its visual representation. It's mostly the two of us working together to create that world. I love him so dearly, and he's so talented. It makes sense that he shot the pieces for this collaboration. It also was great that he shot the pieces backstage for the show because he knows the brand better than anyone, other than Danielle and myself. Danielle has also been with me from the beginning.
This is super interesting because the fashion industry can be very competitive, but these relationships built around collaboration feel like a breath of fresh air.
Some of the people that I look up to most in the industry have these long-standing, creative partnerships; people that have such a distinct visual language and world through the images they make. I think that comes from putting in the time to build trust and create a language together. Our industry is competitive, and it moves fast. There's an unspoken pressure to constantly do new work and work with new people. For me, the work that always feels the best, the most honest, and powerful are the images that I make with someone like Romain, a dear friend and a photographer with whom I've worked for over 10 years. In the same way, if you shoot somebody who you've known for many years or someone that you have a lot of time to shoot with, there's a different kind of energy that comes from the images than someone you just met on the day. As a result, I think there’s an intimacy and unspoken energy that you can feel in the images.
SANTANGELO is so personal through and through; it's my community. It's the people around me and the people I love. We’re always shooting friends and artists in my world and my life. I think people resonate with that. Some of the most confirming feedback I've received over the years has been hearing that a strong sense of identity and honesty resonates from the brand. In a time when so many brands and images start to feel the same, hearing that is what people resonate with in SANTANGELO means so much.
