Iconic women - Iconic jewellery

Dinny Hall needs no introduction. The British Queen of Hoops has been a beloved jeweller for 30 years and is still going strong, designing and sketching coveted pieces of jewellery year in, year out.

Like many extremely creative people, Dinny gets inspired by everything around her. But in her Notting Hill shop, the first shop she opened back in 1992, there is a wall of inspiration, women who have shaped the Dinny Hall brand without knowing it, sometimes posthumously.

“I think that when people come and see the jewellery in situ, they feel what the brand’s all about, the realness of it. There is a genuine life story behind it, it's not just brilliant marketing. It's a true story, it’s me, us… we just wing it.”

Visiting Dinny in her store also means being introduced to the remarkable women who have inspired this remarkable British jeweller: “I have designed a whole collection around Josephine Baker.

“You can Google her and see how amazing she was. But I got obsessed with her before anyone even knew she was there just because I would go through old clippings. There was no Internet when I got obsessed with Josephine Baker.

“It’s about her sense of performance with jewellery. From those early days to today, I'm influenced by Josephine Baker, which is why she's up there [on the wall].

“She's up there because she was a complete maverick. But it's not just that, it's also what she represents and her lifestyle. And what she did in her life, she was the most amazing, courageous woman.”

Moving along on the wall, Dinny points at another image: “Hedy Lamarr.

“Sometimes she's just wearing a simple pair of hoops like I do. But she also discovered frequency hopping technology.”

In fact, Hedy Lamarr has been dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi”, as well as GPS and Bluetooth.  

“But she was also the first woman to be nude on TV! She was first woman to swim with nothing on and be filmed. And she's an absolute beauty, but an intellectual at the same time. And she wears hoops.”

Dinny Hall is attracted to trailblazing women, who wear their jewellery and are never worn by it. 

“This is Talitha Getty. She's wearing Ossie Clark there and when I was a little girl, I used to really want to wear Ossie Clark. I loved that Bohemian kind of look, that's the most iconic picture. 

“I did a whole collection called Talitha. It was based on what I wanted her to wear of mine.”

The Talitha collection is a special collection for Dinny. She has a pair of Talitha earrings on the wall above her desk, a reminder to her team “that we will probably at some point rework the collection”.

“The earrings are up there because they're one of the most favourite pieces I've ever made, and they were for her, and they’re called the Talitha earrings.

“They're kind of like chain mail. But tin hat picture in the shop, she's in Morocco. So this is a motive that you see in Moroccan rugs, the quatrefoil, you see it everywhere.

“I did a sketch with the help of Claire, my trusted right-hand woman in the jewellery department, and then she actually put them together. They're so complicated because they have to have a rigid bit, but we wanted that lightness of feel, so that when you move, they sort of move and undulate.  

“I think they're one of my most favourite designs, and they sold really well. But I don't often wear them. I used to wear them…”

Having moved on from the shop to Dinny’s desk, we find a “moodboard”, a mix of beautiful women and Dinny Hall jewellery.

“It's a miniature wall of some of the vintage stuff from the 1980s. There's a 16-year-old Naomi Campbell, and actually she’s wearing my bangles. That’s Christy Turlington, that's a Vogue cover…

“You have the massive plexiglass cuffs with silver. This is a little sneak peek of some of the things which were designed a long time ago, and I think somewhere on this picture is a very early hoop. That is the Dinny hoop, and that was, I think fashion magazine Harper's circa 1994.

“I did have that fashion credibility. And that's a kind of just a montage of it all, cause it's quite hard to see that now, after all those years. You can see how things evolve and you can't carry on sitting on your own making enormous things that look great on the cover of a magazine, but you can't really wear.”  

Wearability and longevity are important to Dinny, who says: “it actually underpins everything. 

“All my friends have daughters, my goddaughters, and they all wear vintage Dinny Hall jewellery from their mums. They steal in the jewellery box and they're building their own collections. It gets handed down through generations, and that's really what it's all about, at the end of the day.”