Creature Comfort

Eddie Borgo is leaving his urban comfort zone and taking a jaunt into the wild with Fall 2011, a collection that the New York–based designer will present in Paris next week. Plastered on the walls of his studio in midtown Manhattan are pictures of spindly-legged praying mantises, hotly colored beetles, and orchids in full bloom. As Borgo tells it, the idea was to give geometric rigor to organic shapes and import some of the architectural edge of the city into the natural world. As for specific points of reference, he cites biologist Ernst Haeckel and the seminal book Art Forms of Nature and it’s those detailed, anatomical illustrations that give the new jewels their dark and sinister luster. In keeping with this taste for danger, Borgo is featuring the most venomous of species in his series of pendants, like a silver scorpion suspended on a string of onyx beads that happens to sit within stinging distance of the wearer’s jugular.

(vogue.com)