DIAMONDS: JULIUS KLEIN • DRESS: MERUERT TOLEGEN • SHOES: MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA • DIRECTED BY MARK LIM
On Memory and Meaning
Our lives move too quickly. Diamonds don’t. Between the two, fleeting moments become something we can hold onto.
We are surrounded by what disappears.
People change. Places vanish. Relationships begin and end. Versions of ourselves come and go almost before we’ve had time to notice them. Our lives move quickly, and the moments that matter can be reduced to a handful of seconds across the expanse of a human life.
And now there is the digital landscape we collectively inhabit, where reflections of our lives scroll past in a blur—memories made, shared, consumed and even missed almost as quickly as they happen. We are constantly moving on to the next thing, sometimes before we’ve had the chance to fully feel the thing we’re in.
Birthdays. Graduations. First apartments. New jobs. Marriages. Divorces. Recoveries. Epiphanies. Adventures. Achievements. Friendships. Beginnings. Endings.
As humans, we are drawn to what endures. Physical things to help us connect with one another. To celebrate. To remember. To say: this happened. This mattered. We were here. To help us hold onto what cannot physically remain.
A diamond is a timeless, analog, one-of-a-kind expression of that impulse. Each diamond existed long before us and may exist long after us. And yet we can temporarily give it a piece of our story to carry. I like to think diamonds remember. Not literally, obviously. But energetically.
They hold the vibrations of billions of years, echoes of the ancient material from which we —and everything around us—emerged. They have survived fire and darkness and pressure across stretches of time humans can never experience. There is something mystical about holding something that has existed for so long—something small, unique, and bright—and then imagining the stories it might hold once it becomes part of a human life.
DIAMONDS: JULIUS KLEIN • JACKET: AKKI • HEADBAND: CHLOÉ • DIRECTED BY MARK LIM
NECKLACE: DE BEERS • DIRECTED BY ANNA SABATINI
Heirloom diamonds make this idea tangible. They absorb traces of people who came before us, and when they are passed on, they connect the past with the present. The stone remains, but its meaning changes. Something new begins.
Because a diamond doesn’t arrive with a predetermined meaning, we give it one. And maybe that is true of beauty itself.
There are moments when something—
A scent. A person. A place. A song. A piece of clothing. A work of art. A stone.
—Catches our eye. Hooks into something deep inside. Takes our breath away. We don’t always know why, but we pause.
I’ve always been fascinated by that feeling. The way music can return you to a fluttery feeling that happened only once. The way a photograph can bring back a room, a party, a moment that no longer exists. The way a particular object can suddenly make something inside you ignite and feel again. It’s part of the mystery of beauty: it isn’t just the object, but the relationship between the thing and the person looking at it. We bring ourselves to what we see. And sometimes, something comes back to us.
In a culture built around scrolling, swiping, skipping, optimizing and constantly updating, there is something almost radical about an analog object that asks us to stop, to look. To resist the algorithm that can flatten our individuality.
A diamond reminds us of what makes us singular. To hold something in our hands and let it symbolize what, and who we want to hold onto. A physical punctuation mark in time. It connects the vastness of geological time with the strange brevity of a human life. Something billions of years old becomes part of a moment that may last only seconds—but that we decide is worth remembering.
BRACELET: FOR FUTURE REFERENCE VINTAGE • DIRECTED BY ANNA SABATINI
RINGS: BRENT NEALE, CIRCA 1700, DE BEERS, FERNANDO JORGE, FOR FUTURE REFERENCE VINTAGE, VAN CLEEF & ARPELS, WILLIAM GOLDBERG, ZAHN Z • DIRECTED BY ANNA SABATINI
And then there is the light.
A diamond doesn’t make its own light. It receives light and transforms it, breaking it into rainbow shimmer and flashes of something otherworldly.
We move through this impossibly brief life collecting moments—some monumental, some invisible. We take them in and transform them into memory, into identity, into stories about who we have been and who we are becoming.
Perhaps that is the wonder within a diamond. So incredibly ancient, yet still able to catch the light. Something so old, yet able to transform with us as it becomes completely, intimately ours.
That we can look at it and see not only what it is, but what it means to us.
DIAMONDS: JULIUS KLEIN • DIRECTED BY MARK LIM
Director: Mark Lim
Director of Photography: Carl Knight
Creative Director: Lizzy Oppenheimer
Featuring: Chol Mawal Chuol (Daha Casting Management), Isabel Thuma (Ford Models), Amrit Singh Sandhu (MC Barnes), Huan Zhou (Elite Models)
Production: Petty Cash
Producer: Anna Sabatini
Editor: Victoria Mortati
Stylist: Alison Marie Isbell
Production Design: Pearl Jones
Hair: Ginger Ryan
Makeup: Deanna Melluso, Forward Artists
Manicure: Yukie Miyakawa, See Management
Casting: Emma Matell
Gaffer: Erik Snyder
1st AC: Alexis Aguilar
2nd AC: Jillian Maggio
Key Grip: Butch Hogan
Swing: Alex Doyon
Coordinator: Tyler DeMauro
Coordinator: Joss Gomez
Production Assistants: Natalie Barnes, Taylor Snook, Sunny Vazirani, Rafa Guevara, Nicholas Paulino
DIT: Dominick Pietrzak
Stylist Assistants: Olivia Corderi, Finley Peterson
Makeup Assistant: Brett Morgan
Tailor: Iris Tasa
Director: Anna Sabatini
DP: Seymore Fleck
DP: Joss Gomez (Jello)
Editor: Tyler DeMauro
Photographer/Director: Julia Avgusta
DP: Ildar Khusnetdinov
Creative Director: Lizzy Oppenheimer
Featuring: Malaika, NOAH Management
Stylist: Veronika Dronova
Hair: Sanne Schoofs
Makeup: Maria Ovejero
Manicure: Anastasia Feoktistoff
Producer: Margo Praet
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