Naomi Filmer

Naomi Filmer is a jewellery and body-object designer whose work has expanded jewellery beyond conventional adornment into sculpture, installation, film and fashion collaboration. She completed a master’s degree in Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Art in London and built her reputation through catwalk projects with designers including Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Anne Valérie Hash. Her practice has remained closely tied to teaching and exhibition-making, including work as an Associate Lecturer in BA Jewellery Design at Central Saint Martins and teaching at London College of Fashion and HEAD Genève.

Filmer’s mid-1990s work with Hussein Chalayan forms one of her sustained fashion collaborations. She collaborated on Along False Equator, Nothing/Interscope, Still Life and Lands Without, collections in which Chalayan was already testing bodily support, rigid materials and garments that extended into surrounding space. Filmer’s contribution belonged to jewellery and sculptural body objects, giving those collections additional points of contact with the skin and with areas of the body that clothing often leaves unarticulated.

Outside the runway, Filmer has exhibited internationally across fashion and applied art contexts and has developed sculptural installations and image-based presentations. Her material range has included glass, rubber, ice and chocolate, substances chosen for their ability to register pressure, temperature, contact and decay. Film, photography and lenticular imagery have allowed temporary or fragile works to persist through another medium while preserving her focus on specific anatomical zones.

Filmer begins with the body as a site of contour, pressure and absence. Her objects often occupy hollows, edges and exposed planes, treating a shoulder, mouth, hand or gap around the body as a place with its own architecture. Jewellery becomes an instrument for drawing attention to anatomy and to the space an object displaces, which gives even a small piece a sculptural scale.

Material behaviour is equally important. Glass can hold an exact cast form; rubber can flex around flesh; ice and chocolate introduce melting, temperature and duration. These choices let the object change through wear or display and make physical contact part of the design. The work can be polished or deliberately unstable, but its form stays closely controlled and tied to a specific bodily action.

Her fashion collaborations apply the same logic to a larger silhouette. A body object can act as brace, interruption, extension or visual hinge within a garment, adding a spatial problem for the designer and wearer to negotiate. Filmer’s strongest contributions keep the object’s own identity intact while making it inseparable from the posture, movement and exposed anatomy of the person wearing it.