DESIGNER Focus DIVERSE DESIGN

Jenny Guttridge Talks To Young Qatari Designer

LEILA ABU ISSA ABOUT HER ENDEAVOURS WITH HER JEWELLERY BRAND LEILA ISSAM.

When did you first realise that you wanted to pursue your career as a jewellery designer?

That’s great, there are so many different influences in there from fashion and then interiors, how does that translate into your work? Do you use the design that you learned through other areas for inspiration?

The path was a bit long, I’m not going to lie, I always knew I wanted to design, but I didn’t know what, and it the brand. I feel it’s really important to diversify your mind.

Obviously, we’re in the Young Qatari Designers booth at DJWE. How does being Qatari influence your work? Do you draw on any traditional designs or motifs or methods?

I don’t use any traditional motifs, however I am very inspired by the women around me, it really inspires me, what they want to wear, how they want to feel in the jewellery and it helps me create the designs. How do you feel when you wear your jewellery?

I honestly design things I want to wear, when I do that it’s a feeling I want to feel. Sometimes you want to feel very feminine and sometimes you want to feel very edgy so we have two different lines, somethings that are very dreamy and feminine and another line that’s a bit more practical.

Absolutely, I am really glad my path was so diverse in design as it helped me build the brand as a whole from the branding to the interior of the location to really complete showed in my university path to be honest. So I started in fashion and I quickly realised that that wasn’t it so I moved into conceptual design in Paris, I completed three years and then I felt like I needed something more to come back to The Middle East as conceptual design doesn’t exist here yet, so if I wanted to come back I had to do something else. With this in mind I enrolled in interior design in Florence and then ended up working in a gold and diamond trading company so I was doing the business development part, and there I had all the materials. I had the gold and the diamonds to work with and we used to distribute, and then I fell in love. That’s where the story started. And I went back after two years of working with diamonds to complete a jewellery design course, I think all of the hands-on design experience that I’d had in jewellery helped! So, I did that and that’s how it started.