Meet Misho, the minimalist Mumbai jewellery label

The chaos of Mumbai was perhaps an unlikely starting point for Suhani Parekh’s minimalist jewellery line. Having grown up around the sights, sounds and smells of India’s largest and most populated city, Parekh wanted her debut collection for Misho to be the exact opposite. ‘In Mumbai, your senses are always activated, for better or for worse,' she says. ‘I wanted to strip away the excess.'

But Parekh, who founded her label in 2016, never really planned to become a jeweller. A creative child, who was as equipped to play with a Potter’s Wheel as she was to paint, she decided to attend Goldsmiths in London for her undergraduate degree — choosing a multidisciplinary course that left many routes open to her. ‘For a while, I considered focusing on art history, but I realised I was most at peace when creating something. It was a way for me to channel my thoughts.'

She turned to sculpture, working with metal which lent itself well to Parekh’s transition into jewellery — the latter came about after realising the pieces she was making during her course looked better worn on the body, than mounted on a plinth. ‘I still think of my work as tiny pieces of sculpture,' she says, of her chunky curb-chain necklaces, stackable pebble rings and sculptural hoops that resemble a deflated football. ‘I love the idea that a piece of jewellery activates the space of the body very much like a piece of sculpture activates a physical space.'

Parekh now works exclusively in gold-plated sterling silver. ‘I come from a region in India that has a long and very important silver tradition,' she says. 'For me jewellery is silver, and silver is jewellery — it’s precious, it’s feminine, it timeless.' She now splits her time between Mumbai — where her studio is — and London, which, while still a city is a rural getaway compared to the intense Indian weather and traffic.

She’s endlessly inspired by the architecture and cultural differences of the two. ‘I love that I can work in my studio all day on a rainy monsoon day in Mumbai, and then one week later spend a summery afternoon designing a collection while sat at a park in London,' she says. And while her pieces are still clean and unembellished, her collections have gained texture over time. ‘My first line was very simple, geometric forms,' she says. ‘When I look at it now, it feels like three-dimensional drawings. My work is now so much more complex and layered.' Perhaps Mumbai and its sensory overload is working its way into the jewellery after all — albeit on an intrinsically subtle scale. 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Misho website