Orit Elhanati

Orit Elhanati is a Copenhagen-based goldsmith and jewellery designer who founded the fine-jewellery house Elhanati in 2012. Raised in Denmark in a family with Danish, Greek and Israeli roots, she describes her identity through overlapping cultural histories and a strong attachment to landscape, mythology and ancient objects. Her practice developed outside the conventional seasonal fashion calendar and centres on hand-worked gold.

Elhanati built her namesake house from an atelier practice into a wider collection of rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, high jewellery and objects. Her work has been recognised for irregular surfaces, dark gold tones and forms that retain traces of hand construction. Copenhagen remains the centre of the business and the place from which she develops both recurring collections and bespoke pieces.

In February 2022, Elhanati began a collaboration with Khaite. The project brought her jewellery language into Catherine Holstein’s fashion context through pieces including jewellery, hair accessories and belts, followed by an expanded second release. The collaboration preserved the distinction between the two authors. Elhanati remained responsible for the jewellery practice while Khaite supplied the clothing context and shared product direction.

The relationship is significant because it gave Khaite a defined hard-accessories collaboration without establishing an independently proven in-house jewellery division. For Elhanati, the project extended an atelier-led practice into a New York fashion house while retaining the material and surface qualities of her own work. She continues to direct Elhanati from Copenhagen.

Elhanati works with gold as a material that records pressure, heat and repeated handling. Surfaces are allowed to remain irregular, with marks, ridges and softened edges giving each object a sense of movement. The finish resists the visual neutrality of machine-perfect jewellery and makes the act of fabrication visible in the final piece.

Her references move through mythology, ancient symbols, architecture, desert landscapes and the sea. These sources enter the work through shape, texture and abstraction. A ring, pendant or earring can suggest an eroded fragment, a small archaeological object or a piece of landscape while remaining designed for daily contact with the body.

Intuition plays a central role in development. Elhanati has described designing through an inner, exploratory impulse and building form gradually in the atelier. The method gives the work a sculptural quality at a small scale, with volume and texture adjusted through direct manipulation of the metal.

The Khaite collaboration demonstrates how that language can move into fashion accessories without losing its origin. Gold hardware, jewellery and leather-linked objects interact with Holstein’s clothing while retaining Elhanati’s irregular surface and compact sculptural forms. The collaboration works through adjacent practices, with each designer’s authorship remaining legible.