To help her friend with his final fashion show as a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Lara Bohinc, then a master’s student in metalwork and jewelry, created an elaborate headpiece—what she describes as a modern-day version of headphones draped in jewelry and wire. “It was nothing special,” she quips, but it caught the eye of British Vogue’s former fashion editor Lucinda Chambers, who requested the experimental headgear be shot for an editorial in the magazine.
If anything, that big break made the Slovenia-born, London-based Bohinc hustle that much more. “You have to do a lot of editorial for it to change your life,” she points out. It’s an accumulation of hard work that has propelled her career forward, she says, which includes winning the British Fashion Council’s New Generation Award after graduating in 1997, opening her own eponymous studio, and consulting for the likes of Gucci and Cartier.
Her aesthetic centers on balance—something she’s been searching for since she studied industrial design at Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts in Slovenia—and jewelry design gives her the freedom to explore the limits of materiality. “It’s a mix of all the disciplines,” she explains. “It’s graphic, and it lies between fashion and industrial design.” But after years of working on small accessories, Bohinc was ready to tackle “larger objects that are not related to the body and limited by wearability,” she says. Product design is “something I was always meant to do.
Bohinc’s Since the World is Round collection draws from celestial bodies, boasting three geometrically shaped chairs, Orbit, Solar, and Lunar.
Her Art Deco-inspired furniture pieces are a testament to her evolution as a designer, marrying materials like glass and ceramic with her signature use of metals, which “bring a light to the body,” she explains. Bohinc’s collections are part of an obsession with “splitting and deconstructing pure geometric forms,” she adds. Take her Collision lighting series, inspired by the jewelry range of the same name, where she plays “with the moving of spheres.”
Adding to her list of accomplishments is a London showroom that opened last year, and her first public commission, the brass and concrete Friendship Bench designed for Kensington and Chelsea Council that sits opposite Brutalist landmark Trellick Tower. Bohinc’s growing furniture line recently welcomed seating and consoles, as well. A nod to her keen design eye, the playful, feminine pieces are dressed in conspicuous colors and circular shapes that harken back to a glamorous era while still looking firmly to the future.
