From Russia with love: the fairytale jewels of Ichien, a small Maison in Moscow ♦ ︎
Like other Russian Maison, Ichien is not widely known in the West. Yet it is worth looking closely at the work of the company founded in Moscow in 2008. Its name, first of all: it is in honor of the founder and chief designer of the Mher Karapetyan Tigranovich brand, known as Ichien, born and lived in the small Armenian town of Echmiadzin. He then studied at the Art College of Yerevan in the Faculty of Painting. In 1999 he moved to Moscow and for two years he studied at the art institute named after VI Surikov. As he recounts, his path in jewelry began in the library of the Surikov Institute.
Studying the art of the early twentieth century in the library, in one of the books the young man saw the sketches of Alfons Mucha’s jewels. And from that moment he attended the institute’s library just to study the jewels. “I was very lucky,” he says today. “From the beginning I met and made friends with jewelers who were very demanding about fairness and quality of work and were anxious to do something new. With them he started working and at the same time studying jewelry “.
The young Armenian designer then went to India and Taiwan, where he studied acupuncture and painting. In India, he met the Zen Master, who gave him a new name: Ichien. The word in Chinese means “a look”. In 2008 Mher-Ichien returned to Moscow and opened the company that bears his new name. His work has already received awards from major international jewelry design competitions, in particular the Hong Kong Design Excellence Awards. Alessia Mongrando
