For more than a decade, one photographer and a rotating room of makers turned my jewelry into pictures. I want to tell you about them, because the pieces were never the point. They were.

I found my creative family before I had ever met them in person.

It was a shoot called Haute Trash, for a beauty and fashion magazine called Beauty Underground. I sent my jewelry into a room I wasn't in, and the images came back, and something in me went still and certain. The photographer was Nicole Marcelli. The hair and styling was Charlie Price. I did not know yet that those two names would run through the next ten years of my work like a spine. I only knew, looking at what they had made with my pieces, that I had found my people.

That is the story I actually want to tell. Not the jewelry. The people who helped me photograph it, over and over, in slaughterhouses and galleries and Nicole's living room with three chihuahuas underfoot. Because when I look back at every shoot in this archive, the thing that moves me is not a necklace. It is a room full of makers who all showed up, again and again, to make something beautiful together for no reason other than that we could.

The core of it

I found Nicole by accident. One of my favorite models, Antoinette, posted a shoot on Instagram, and the photography stopped me cold. I asked who shot it. It was Nicole. I reached out, half expecting nothing, and she said yes.

Our first shoot was at an apartment complex with a pool, with a hair and makeup artist Nicole worked with named Mel Akana McIntosh, one of the most talented people I have ever stood beside on a set. That day, with Nicole and Mel and Antoinette and Savanna, an instant coalition formed. It lasted years. To this day, the shoots that team made are my favorite work I have ever been part of.

Most of them happened at Nicole's house. She would let us turn her living room into one enormous studio, laying white panels across the floor so we could roll the big lights anywhere. I was almost always the gaffer, holding up reflector panels, moving lights, waving a fan to catch movement in a model's hair. Those days ran seven hours, sometimes more, and none of it felt like work. It felt like play. We had privacy and time, which are the two things a shoot never gets, and we spent them lavishly.

Charlie came into my life differently. When I met him, he was at the helm of Beauty Underground, immersed in the North American Hairstyling Awards, doing hair and makeup for runway during Paris Fashion Week. He brought that to Denver and helped build a real fashion scene here, producing some of the biggest shows the city had ever seen. He was already a considerable figure when I was just starting out.

I still remember the day he texted me. People kept saying my name to him, he said. My jewelry was turning up in the art scene, in the local magazines, in national ones. He had been a little skeptical of all the buzz, he admitted, until he saw the work for himself. And when he did, it won him over completely. He reached out to collaborate, and we never really stopped. First he styled my models for other designers' shows, then for shows that were mine, always with an eye for exactly how to let the jewelry lead: solid colors, white, minimal silhouettes, nothing that competed with the work.

Nicole, Charlie, Mel. That was the center. Everything else orbited it.

The era

For a stretch of years, Denver had a fashion scene worth the name, and we were inside it.

We presented to sold-out rooms at City Hall and the Fillmore. The collection I called Unfolding, made of laser-cut and UV-reactive plexiglass, walked two of the biggest nights: a Fillmore show for more than three thousand people, and a City Hall showcase where my husband Kris talked the venue into renting us a massive LED screen for a hundred dollars a minute (worth every penny because the visuals deserved to be seen in that way), and I sent my models down the runway carrying black-light flashlights so the pieces lit up in the dark. Nobody had seen anything like it. That is a night that deserves its own telling, and it will get one.

But the scene was never really about the big nights. It was about the same faces, over and over. The same hair and makeup artists, the same designers, the same models, coming together for one more production. It felt like family. Every show gave us a reason to gather and make something dazzling.

And here is the part I need you to understand: almost none of it made anyone any money. We created for the act of creation itself, and set financial gain aside to make beauty instead. We threw candy and marshmallows and licorice around Nicole's studio for a shoot we called Gem-O-Licious, just because it sounded fun.

We drove into the mountains at the peak of aspen season and Mel pressed gold foil onto the models to catch the yellow of the trees. We did a whole pool shoot for no reason at all, and I remember Jessica drawing a crowd of very distracted apartment residents while we laughed. We photographed Karly one still winter afternoon with nobody there but the three of us, Karly doing her own makeup, and it was one of the most intimate shoots I ever did.

That model, Jessica Nazarenus, went on to sign with Wilhelmina in New York and shoot for Guess and Harper's Bazaar. Looking back, I realize I was working with world-class talent across the board, and most of us were doing it for love.

The jewelry traveled, too, into rooms I was never in. Charlie would ask to borrow pieces for his own editorials, and they would turn up in Denver Life and in Denver Colorado Luxury Magazine. A young photographer named Gabby Ruddick, whom I met when she was a student at the Art Institute of Colorado, borrowed pieces for a conceptual shoot and has since built a career in New York. A team painted models in black and white for an edgy editorial in Dgaray Timeless Beauty, and my statement pieces slid right in. That is its own kind of gift, watching your work become part of someone else's vision.

There were shoots that took real grit. Twice I dragged an entire team into the dead of a Colorado winter, once to an abandoned tree farm and once around Boulder, changing outfits in the mud and retreating to the car to thaw. My models never let the cold reach their faces. And there were shoots wrapped in other people's genius, like the day we photographed the Orenda collection inside my friend Doug Kacena's gallery, K Contemporary, styled by Vanessa, who owns the boutique Goldyn, and whom, in one of my favorite facts about my own life, I used to babysit as a child.

Each of those has more story in it than a paragraph can hold. I am going to give the richest of them their own posts, one at a time.

The hinge

Then the pandemic came, and for two years, the gathering stopped.

The Denver fashion scene never really recovered. Some designers quit. Many of the models moved to the coasts, where the work is steadier. Charlie stepped back from producing shows, because filling seats had become too hard. Part of me still mourns that era, honestly, because of what it was for. It was the reason a specific group of talented people kept coming back into the same room. When the reason went away, the room emptied.

What survived was the making itself, in smaller forms. Charlie never stopped working. He learned to produce a whole shoot with nothing but himself, a makeup artist, and a model, and he learned to get that work published. Some of us found a more independent way to contribute to fashion, less collaborative but still alive. The family scattered, but it did not disappear.

Still chasing it

I am still looking for the magic of that room.

I have started finding it again, in new people. There is a shoot I recently made with the photographer E J Carr and the couture designer Maggie Burns, and another already scheduled for this October, for my Second Light collection. Different faces, same feeling: everyone reading the same brief and bringing their own craft language to it, until the whole thing coheres. That coherence is never an accident. It is what happens when every maker in the room understands the assignment at the level of material and light, not just a mood board.

I know now what I did not fully know then. The connection was always the point. The dazzling pictures were the beautiful byproduct.

These images are the proof that it was real: that for a stretch of years, in a landlocked city, a group of people who loved to make things made them together, and let my little pieces of jewelry be the excuse. I am more grateful for those people than I am for any single photograph we captured. To Nicole, to Charlie, to Mel, to every model who smiled through the cold and every artist who lent their eye, thank you. My work found its meaning in your hands, and then on the women who wore it home.

That is the whole thing, really. My jewelry was never the story. You were.

Every photographer, hair and makeup artist, stylist, designer, and model who helped make these images is named on my Creative Credits page. Please go see their work.

My pieces are one of a kind, which means finding the right one is a little like the shoots themselves: it is about the match, not the mass of it.