Waris New York, by Sandro Kopp

“A lot of people say I’m East-meets-West,” says Waris Ahluwalia, sitting at a hundred-year-old farm table in his glossy new studio space off Fashion Avenue. “But I am more like past-meets-future.” The weathered furniture, reclaimed from barns upstate and strewn about the poured-concrete and glass workspace, seem to echo this claim, but the artist behind the much-fetishized jewelry creations from House of Waris is talking about something deeper. He’s talking about tradition spurring on innovation. He’s talking about an artistic leap forward from a trip back to one’s roots.

Waris’s own roots wind back to the Punjab region of India where he was born and lived the first 5 years of his life before he and his parents emigrated to Brooklyn. “I come from a family of professionals,” he says. “Doctors, lawyers, engineers, CEOs; my uncle was, at one point, one of the top ten mathematicians in the country. So there was a different road for me. It has been a transition for someone who didn’t know they could make things. I had a natural interest in people who were creative. No one told me I could make things. I didn’t know better—I didn’t know I could create.”

Early on he was fascinated by the arts. “I was drawn to it by the music,” he says, “and by the nightlife. I was just taking it in, surrounded by creative people and then, I was like, wait, I can work with these people. I can produce or… still not realizing that I could do this, I could make stuff.” At this point Waris tried organizing an arts magazine, but it didn’t take flight. He dabbled in filmmaking, art show curation, even restaurants and other indirect endeavors to scratch his itch—but he was already arranging people, already with the idea of a collaborative community in his mind.

All the while he was making the scene, an endeavor which, these days, gets a bad rap. In fact, in a 2009 interview with Page 6, his then girlfriend, Chiara Clemente, felt compelled to defend Waris’s heavy presence on the scene, shouting down a silent but not so subtly implied label of ‘socialite.’ Waris himself is in a unique position to defend the party circuit, which he calls, “The golf course,” i.e. that place where people meet to casually discuss life, business and potential projects while blowing off a little steam. As part of his practice as a Sikh he doesn’t drink, so there are no sloppy side effects of his nightlife, A, and B, just look at the results.

“Every one of [the artists with whom I’ve collaborated] has just been a friend,” he says, and nods his head to indicate the convenient example of photographer Andrew Zuckerman who has stopped by the new studio space to leaf through stacks of framed pictures and dig the rough draft of the floor plan. “Andrew—we’re working together now, but he is my oldest friend in New York. I always loved his work and I just happened to be doing birds, the Omnia Vincit Amor collection, inspired by wallpaper in The Raphael hotel in Paris, and then Andrew was working on this book, Bird, so, I thought, this might be our chance!”  Zuckerman’s book is made up of stunning color portraits of exotic birds taken in their natural habitats all over the world. Seeing both strength and fragility in the creatures, Waris selected several of the images—some dynamic and almost mythic, others lyrical—and sent them to his enameller in India who then shaped and hand painted a collection of pendants. The resulting pieces, part figurine, part fresco, are something new unto themselves. Like a successful film adaptation of a novel or, more accurately, a painting from a familiar photograph, the new work compliments and amplifies on the original. It has intrinsic value—and, in the case of these porcelain danglers, substantial monetary worth to boot—but really sings in unison with its partner, like the collaborators themselves. Of this partnership Waris says, “Working with someone else is an incredible chance to go deeper into the relationship with them. I know Andrew on this level, now let’s get it to a new level as well, to create something together. That’s all I want to do: make something. I don’t care about the titles—jeweler, whatever—I don’t care what it is, as long as I am making something beautiful.”

Of those deeper levels of himself, the ones he shares with his friends and collaborators, but to us remain shrouded in mystery, Waris says, “I think it is a combination of I am still exploring it and it is easier for the world to take you in one step at a time. Everybody gets confused. In general, people like boxes. People are utterly confused by me.” Here the sometime actor mimics a baffled chorus, “‘You are actually acting? In real parts? With respected directors?’ It’s the boxing-in. I have no fear of the boxing-in, but, you’ve got to slowly introduce what you are going to do to the world,” he says.  So are we witnessing an unveiling? Is there a grand plan? “Yeah, yeah,” he says, but then quickly changes tack. “I ended up here not by a grand plan, but just by the universe bringing me here. When doors open you’ve got to walk through them and you’ve got to decide at what pace and in what direction, but it opens doors for everyone.”

Indeed, there is an apparent Tao to Waris’s career path—an acceptance, a going-with-the-flow, that kept him open to new and even foreign pursuits. As he states it, “I didn’t pick jewelry. I can’t tell you how little I thought of jewelry, how insignificant it was in my life. There’s no reference in my life to it, prior to my starting it.”

As with all tales of auspicious moments, after numerous reiterations the story of Waris’s ‘discovery’ feels well-handled, as if it has developed a patina of fairy dust, so we asked him to relate it for us as he remembers it. “It’s just so simple. It was the recession, so I thought, ‘oh, I should wear diamonds.’ It is my tendency, my flaw, to go the opposite way. So, I had these rings made and I was spending a lot of time in LA because New York gets cold. I’m in Maxfield’s, I’m wearing the rings and [the store clerk] comes up and says, ‘nice rings.’ I said, ‘thank you.’ There was no reason for me to even imagine that I would sell to Maxfield’s. The second question was, ‘are they yours?’ She meant, did you make them? What would she think that? How many times that someone is wearing something is it something they made? That store just really knows their clients. Third question was, ‘do you want to meet the buyer?’ So I met Sarah and they placed an order. And then I had to figure out how much they cost.”

Portrait by Sophie Caby

For someone who fell into his profession Waris is exceedingly enthusiastic and still committed to his craft full-tilt. “It’s thrilling,” he says. “It’s an adventure every second. It’s a platform to create—I make the boxes, I work with the printer of the book, I work with every aspect. There is not one aspect of my operation I am not directly involved in.” He considers his personal touch his calling card. So much so that when the esteemed boutique Browns of London wanted to preview a collection before they would sell his wares and asked to see a lookbook he refused. He insisted that he arrive personally, meet the owner and buyer and have them hold the pieces. “These things have weight,” he says, and he’s talking more than that which appears on scales. He believes in authenticity, in artisans, and the honor of craftsmanship. He beams with an almost filial pride when talking about the award his same enameller, the young son of an Indian family that has been making enamel for several generations, won for the future-forward technique hand painting he now uses on Waris’s birds.

Waris is to jewelry what a modern-day Brooklyn butcher is to culinaria. He is slow food, organic, atavistic, and obsessed with his ingredients and their sources. In a world of mass production he still makes each of his chains by hand. He is going direct to the source of his gold in Africa—to meet the people who mine it, to get to know them (and be known in return), to be involved. He feels deeply connected to each of his collaborators, be it Zuckerman, Jean Touitou of A.P.C., director Wes Anderson, in whose films Waris is a regular player, or the man who makes his suits. And, in this irony-sodden age, his earnest retro practices are once again cutting edge, proving that values are valuable any time. Summing up his guiding ethic, Waris sounds more like a throwback to a poetic era than a businessman in 2010. “It’s all about romance, “ he says. “The whole damn thing. Romance in every sense: the physical, the emotional, the spiritual. Whether you’re talking Sufi poetry or Rumi or the ladies, it’s all connected. And the first person who has to be romanced is me. If I’m not sold…  If it doesn’t feel authentic… I can’t do it. It has to come from some place real. It goes back to the same thing—all I want to do is create stuff. Forget designer, jeweler, whatever; I wish my title was just, ‘maker.’”