The Ouze, Toby Vernon’s jewelry studio, has quickly become known for its singular, contemporary approach to silver, with designs that appear somewhere between well-loved antiques and Jurassic landscapes glimmering with gemstone fossils. Hang around certain pockets of East London, and you’ll see the flash of one of its textured hair clips on someone knocking back a martini outside Dalston’s Ellie’s Bar, or a gnarled ruby ring trilling a bell as its wearer speeds past on a Lime Bike. Similar scenes are proliferating on the Lower East Side and in Sarugakuchō. A scroll through Instagram will also reveal the furore around The Ouze’s custom modern engagement rings. Or you could just visit Dover Street Market.
On the third day of London Fashion Week, The Ouze staged its third Newgen presentation at 180 Studios. Previous seasons saw Vernon curate the subterranean room into messy domestic tableaux, with pieces nestled among scenes of dinner parties and unfinished musical manuscripts—the detritus of a chaotic creative process. For spring 2027, he brought visitors into another part of jewelry making that is rarely seen.
The dominant color of the room was not sterling silver, ruby, or emerald, but Yves Klein blue. Jewelry sat on and among a sink, chair, cabinet, artist easel, and smaller domestic objects coated in the blue carving wax Vernon uses in the workshop. Every piece from The Ouze begins this way, hand-carved in wax before being translated into precious metal. There are many grades and colors used in jewelry making, but this particular striking blue was the first Vernon worked with. “It’s not too brittle, it’s not too weak, and it’s an amazing color,” he says. “It’s just very important to the brand and the way the jewelry’s made.”
The idea was to give what is normally a temporary and invisible stage of the process as much presence as the finished precious object. Found items collected around London had been repeatedly coated in wax and displayed on white plinths. The larger forms also acted as propositions for where The Ouze might go next, extending the same sculptural language beyond jewelry and into furniture, fashion, and the home.
“From the first presentation, I wanted to subvert what people expected a jeweler could do—it was never going to be clear cases or mannequin hands,” Vernon says as the show receives its finishing touches around us.
Spring 2027 also brought a greater focus on homeware, carrying The Ouze’s distinctive signatures into more everyday objects: sterling-silver corkscrews, valve caps, and candlesticks, alongside vases embedded with raw sapphires. Like the jewelry, they preserve traces that might ordinarily be polished away—fingerprints, folds, and marks left by the hand. There were silver jugs with buckled rims and scarred, almost battered surfaces; a tiny padlock criss-crossed with tool marks; dappled candlesticks that looked as though they had already survived a few centuries; chess pieces; a corkscrew; even a scalpel, Vernon’s most-used tool.
