Jenia Kim, the namesake force behind the Tashkent, Uzbekistan-based fashion label J.Kim, and Natalia Bryantseva, the founder of Berlin-based jewellery brand Avgvst, were both born and raised in the former Soviet Union, Kim in Tashkent and Bryantseva in Russia.
The pair, who met nearly a decade ago, also shares a family history marked by displacement and resilience. Bryantseva’s family was persecuted by Soviet authorities in the 1930s and exiled to Kazakhstan, while Kim’s family is part of the Koryo-saram community of 172,000 ethnic Koreans who were exiled to Central Asia by Joseph Stalin in 1937.
This spring, J.Kim and Avgvst merged their aesthetics and cultural histories for a jewellery collection rooted in craftsmanship and cultural memory. 'For Avgvst, the impulse to collaborate always comes from admiration for the collaborator’s creative mind, and from an ongoing sense of mutual respect and friendship,' explained Bryantseva. 'We’ve always wanted to experiment with jewellery, and we had tried before, but technically, it’s quite complex,' added Kim. 'Avgvst has a very strong professional approach and quality in this field.'
Constructed in white gold, yellow gold, and gold vermeil, the Avgvst x J.Kim collection is built around three ideas that evoke a sense of warmth, heritage, and cultural identity: ‘The Baking Cup’, reimagined as earrings, recalls the pair’s grandmothers’ serving baked goods fresh from the oven; ‘The Tubes’, a contemporary take on traditional Uzbek jewellery, links tubular forms to peridot, garnet, and topaz gemstones; and ‘The Embrace’, flat, floral-shaped motifs resembling cookie-cutter forms, designed to ‘hug’ the wearer’s earlobe or wrist. 'Aesthetically, it’s always about balancing the warmth and decorative richness that exists in Uzbek culture with the clarity and purity of form that comes from Korean culture,' said Kim, whose pieces are in the V&A permanent collection.
To front the Avgvst x J.Kim campaign, Bryantseva and Kim selected New York-based writer and baker Lexie Smith, who, through her research project Bread on Earth, investigates how bread acts as a social, political, economic, and ecological barometer. 'She represents ideas that are important to us – family, craft, dedication to a practice and bringing it to a level of mastery,' said Kim. 'She lives inside the exact territory this collaboration is trying to honour: slow craft, repetition, patience, and the idea that everyday work can carry real cultural weight,' added Bryantseva.
Like her family in the 1930s, Bryantseva also left her home in Russia to start a new life in Berlin. 'People like us – people who are displaced, living away from our own land – try to remember, reconstruct, and restore a sense of where we come from, of our roots,' said Bryantseva. 'I keep my grandmother’s recipe book and bake cookies for my daughter from it. I read that notebook and remember the smell of her food. That is what holds me right now.'
'I think the idea of comfort is very central,' said Kim. 'In a world that often feels overwhelming, there is a need to return to something more essential – to create a sense of stability through simple, human actions, like making something with your hands for your loved ones.'
