Xander Jane's Spiked collection turns a 1990s punk motif into fine jewellery

Alex Jane's fine jewellery brand, Xander Jane, opens with a collection called Spiked. The reference is a teenager on Vancouver Island in the mid-1990s, a leather jacket, a handful of studs. What the Canadian designer wanted to avoid was making the jacket again in gold.

"I'm not 16 anymore, so I had no interest in making punk gear. I'm interested in designing and manufacturing fine jewelry that gets my stamp of approval. Good enough for me," he told FashionUnited.

The spike survived the translation, reworked rather than reproduced. "I took the spike and built something more refined, more precise and, in my opinion, a lot more attractive," Jane said of the line.

His route into the category was commercial before it was creative. Jane runs Modaselle, a Vancouver-based designer resale business dealing in handbags and jewellery, which he says he opened in 2015. "I like nice stuff, so I got interested in designer fashion in my mid-twenties. Handbags and jewellery are the two categories that hold their value, so a boutique around those two was the obvious move," he said.

Authenticating jewellery pulled him into construction. "You can't authenticate with just the logo; you have to understand how the piece was built. How it was assembled, how the surfaces were finished, how the stones were set. I very much enjoy reverse engineering the process, a fun little game," he said.

The tipping point was a single design he could not get anyone to make. "I had an idea for a spiked black diamond ring and thought it would be pretty cool. I tried to get it made and it didn't work out, so I had to figure out how to make it myself. The style I was going for was difficult enough that I had to learn a lot more than I'd planned, and the authentication side of Modaselle got a lot better as a result. I understood how things were built because I was building them," he said.

That ring remains the piece he measures the collection against. Xander Jane now manufactures in-house at its own Canadian atelier, running casting, machining, polishing and hand-finishing under one roof.

The DIY logic goes back further than the business. "In the mid 90s, the punk scene was small enough that you could be a part of it just by showing up. What pulled me in was the music. Nobody was waiting for permission. If you wanted a band, you started one. If you wanted a jacket that looked a certain way, you made it," Jane said.

Next, he is moving away from black diamonds. "I think I'm going to start playing with coloured stones. I've taken an interest in pretty little rocks lately," he said.