The Bande des Quatres Designing Women
A knack for jewelry runs in the family—whether Erin Wahed likes it or not.
It’s pretty tough to get to know the mother-daughter team behind the sculptural jewelry line Bande des Quatres without saying, “Aww,” every five seconds—so just be prepared for that. To track the evolution of their collaborative bond, we got the twosome to submit some of their favorite family photos and asked both Erin Wahed and her mom Janis Kerman about their unique working relationship—that happens to operate across borders, with Erin in NYC and Janis in Montreal. Warning: Diving into what lies ahead will make you want to give your mom a big hug, stat. —jessie pascoe
Click here to see the so-stunning (and hard-working) earrings Erin and Janis created just for us.
“I was born 3 pounds 10 ounces. They compared me to a chicken. Here I am in the pool in Westmount Square in Montreal with Mom.”
Erin: “My mom started making jewelry when she was 15 at summer camp. Being exposed to jewelry as a child and watching my mother work, I knew that I would never have the patience to hand-make jewelry, but it always fascinated me.”
“Smiling with mom in our party outfits on our way to her one-person show at Galerie Jocelyne Gobeil in Montreal. I am one year old.”
Erin: “Each design for Bande des Quatres is collaboration: conceived by myself and handcrafted by my mother.”
“Here, I’m five years old at my father’s 40th surprise party in my favorite dress.”
Erin: “Working with my mother has truly been a gift. I’ve never had a knack for drawing. It’s always ideas for me, and she can read my mind in the sense. I’ll point to something, and she’ll know exactly what I’m thinking and how to translate it. That really works extremely well. It wouldn’t work like that with just anyone.”
“Mom and I having cocktails in our backyard with friends before heading out to my 20th birthday dinner.”
Janis: “I never imagined that Erin and my relationship would morph into a working relationship, too. As in any venture, there are challenges to overcome but working long-distance seems to be one that we have been able to surmount.”
“We’re at the Collection II launch of Bande des Quatres at the Bowery Hotel in New York on January 20, 2012.”
“It’s always exciting to see what direction Erin wants to take us!”
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The Art and Architecture of Bande des Quatres
How Kandinsky and Hadid do their part.
One look at Bande des Quatres’s totally dramatic rings and bracelets, and you know there’s some serious artistic inspiration at play. But you might not get a sense of just how focused and tight those visual cues are: For the two collections Erin Wahed has created with her jewelry-master mom Janis Kerman, she’s drawn from a very select set of Bauhaus art and modern architecture—and named the lines and the pieces accordingly. Here’s Erin’s tour of exactly how those BDQ translations play out. —jessie pascoe
“Piet Mondrian’s genius rests in his ability to utilize primary colors and quadrilaterals while keeping the viewer entranced with every piece. Our Mondrian ring speaks directly to his paintings, as it uses very similar tools: a rectangle and a square from the quadrilateral family in 18-karat yellow gold and oxidized sterling silver, which creates a blackish tone.”
“Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School at Dessau, once said, ‘Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.’ We wanted to make a ring feel like it was an integral part of the hand and body using the same shapes Gropius used to create the school.”
“Credited with painting the first truly abstract works, Wassily Kandinsky thought of his paintings in musical terms, seeing them as improvisations or compositions. His work heavily inspired my photography thesis, where I created visual landscapes using shapes, lines, and colors to develop this harmonious sense of composition that his pieces speak to. With the Kandinsky ring, we isolated one of his most prominent shapes, the circle.”
“To me, Zaha Hadid’s buildings are large scale sculptures. I can imagine that her biggest challenge is in making her buildings work the way she sees them. The Hadid ring was inspired by her way of seeing. It was a design I conceived of, but I was unaware of how it would work. Through intense product development, we were able to achieve the look I originally had in mind.”
“Daniel Libeskind’s use of triangular shapes and his engineering genius inspired the Libeskind ring. With this ring, the goal was to create a piece that pushed a viewer to ask, ‘How is the ring staying on the finger?’”
“The Venturi ring was the one piece that I conceived that was truly self-indulgent. It is a difficult piece to wear, but there is something about how the shapes come together and how the piece looks on a finger that I just love! With Robert Venturi’s Vanna House, there is an indented curvature above the door of the building that seems to be more of an aesthetic addition than anything else.”
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Bande des Quatres
Despite being the daughter of a very successful jewelry designer, Erin Wahed did not plan on following in her mother’s footsteps. “I do not have the patience for it,” she confesses. But when her search for the perfect ensemble for opening night of her senior show—she majored in photography at NYU—led her to collaborate with her mom Janis Kerman on a ring, Erin started to get the bug. Why not use that initial design—an early prototype of what became the duo’s Moholy-Nagy ring—as the basis for a little trial run?
Drawing on her love of modern architecture and abstract photography—see, she’s putting that degree to use!—Erin and her mamma have put out two collections under the label Bande des Quatres since February 2011. Janis creates the pieces in her Montreal studio together with a master goldsmith where everything is finished by hand. But though the craftsmanship is rooted in the techniques and skills the matriarch has honed during her 40 years in the realm, the designs are straight-up edgy, with bracelets anchored by chunky, oxidized silver shapes and rings that give the illusion of pierced fingers. And that has hardly limited their audience: All the jewelry is designed to be unisex, and the BDQ customer base runs the gamut from stylish twenty-somethings to senior citizens. “80-year old ladies with arthritis buy the rings because they can get them on with swollen knuckles.” Talk about advanced style. —jessie pascoe
