‘I think it’s my inner child speaking,’ fine jeweller Sabine Getty explains of her love of bold, primary colours. ‘I love things that take me out of reality and into a happier world.’
It’s no wonder, then, that bright, cartoonish tones from the 1980s infiltrate both Getty’s work and home. The Memphis art movement has long inspired her, be it the zany, zig-zagging rows of diamonds on rings and the bright, waved bangles of her last collection, ‘Memphis’, or the designer’s acid-hued, Ettore Sotsass-filled apartment in Mayfair, London. Her new collection, BIG, follows suit, though this time pooling colour palettes and geometric playfulness from the Eighties film world – specifically the 1988 Tom Hanks hit of the same name.
‘I think the link I have to that decade is totally emotional,’ Getty explains. ‘It’s nostalgia for my childhood: the subconscious memory of growing up with colour and fun design such as the Memphis Group, and watching all the zany films of the time.’ The BIG collection riffs on games paraphernalia, such as dominoes, building blocks and children’s toys, in soft sweet-shop shades. A sugary pink sapphire encrusted doughnut ring hangs from a fine gold collar while elementary shapes – triangles, squares, oblongs – adorn fingers and ear lobes in blue and green sapphires.
But why Big? The film in which a miscalculated wish sees a 12-year-old boy wake up one morning as a 30-year-old man (Hanks), and whose speedy acquisition of an executive job as toy-tester for a world-famous company sets in motion a series of comic events. ‘It’s one of my all-time favourite movies. I think it resonated with kids everywhere and that’s why it’s such a cult hit… the idea of somehow being a kid that must play grown up. Dream and fantasy is so embedded into the movie’s reality that it totally blew my mind!’
An afternoon spent in the playroom with her daughter Gene inspired Getty to rethink her child’s bright wooden shapes, and imagine ‘a world of love, colour, innocence and childishness’. After all, who said life had to be all work and no play?
