Field Notes: Malibu

I've been drawn to the sea my entire life. The salt, the minerality, the way coastlines read like geology made visible. Malibu has a particular quality of light I can't explain — it comes off the water sideways, warm and flat, and hits everything the same way. Skin, stone, sand. You feel it before you see it.

We shot the collection at El Matador. Sea stacks rising out of the Pacific, rock formations carved by wind and water over millions of years. The same forces that make stone what it is, just enormous and right in front of you. Standing there with aquamarine around my neck felt like a closed loop.

Sand is crushed stone and shell. Most people don't think about that. Walk a beach and you're walking on the remains of mountains.

Aquamarine.

Aqua marina. Water of the sea. But raw aquamarine isn't the bright blue of a gemstone counter. It's included, fractured, clouded with mineral history. It looks like something the ocean made and left behind — blue-green and slightly milky, the way shallow water looks over white sand. The way the Pacific looked that afternoon at El Matador when the light dropped low.

The design follows what the material asks for. Nothing forced into symmetry. Nothing smoothed into something easier to look at. Raw stone is already finished. It just needs to be worn.