Meet Göran Kling, Who Is Crafting Street-Smart “Slang” Jewelry in Sweden

Kling is fabricating jewelry that's in tune with the current streetwear trend in a city where the look isn't prevalent If something is "Instantly recognized as 'jewelry,'" he says, "You have to manipulate it very little for it to become intriguing." Context is relevant, too: "The image around the jewelry is almost as important in telling the story as the jewelry itself." Kling's jewelry evokes pawnshops and secondhand markets with piles of chunky trinkets on hastily assembled card tables-and it smells vaguely like teen spirit "There's no jewelry in my family, or even artists, [but] I have this theory: I have this condition that I can't recognize faces, so my earliest memories from childhood are of jewelry.

I remember super-clearly what my grandmother would wear, what my mother would I think I learned to recognize them by the jewelry that they were wearing." What Kling sought, and eventually found, was a "Way of making jewelry that can be artistic and contemporary, but in a younger context maybe-in the vernacular." His expressionistic, even brash, work stands far from the minimalist Scandinavian jewelry aesthetic that was created 50 to 60 years ago when talents like Torun Bülow-Hübe, Sigurd Persson, and Rey Urban "Made Sweden a jewelry country." At the time their simple designs and use of silver rather than gold was revolutionary Kling's jewelry doesn't only look different from the classical Swedish style, it's also made differently too, by casting rather than fabrication.

Though Kling has made men's jewelry in the past, it was mostly women who bought it. . Source