This Jeweler's USM Collaboration Began With Broken Glass
Bernard James' love for USM began with a piece of broken glass. James, who long used USM furniture in his showrooms, was in the process of setting up a new space in 2022 when a glass panel cracked. He rushed to the USM showroom just before it closed in search of a replacement. Not only did the company hook him up, but what started as an emergency became a conversation about making something together.
Though the relationship goes deep, on a surface level, their compatibility may not be obvious. Bernard James channels literally organic inspiration — flowers, mushrooms, the things he grew up seeing near the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens — into elegant fine jewelry. There’s a softness to his work, an appreciation for forms that are perfectly imperfect. I own some of his pieces; I also own a few items produced by the venerable USM, and love them for different reasons: clean lines and a straightforward approach to design. A bit more clinical, but still beautiful.
When I bring this dichotomy up to James ahead of his USM residency in SoHo, he offered a single word: “engineered.” There is connective tissue here but, for him, the difference is the attraction. His work is about contrasts and how natural, like flowers and mushrooms, play against other the forms and materials of high jewelry. “Flora only becomes what it is because of what it’s not,” he explains, referring to his own jewelry line but accurate in the context of nature, too.
Looking at his jewelry within USM's downtown NYC showroom, that makes sense. The organic shapes bounce off of the precise construction in a manner that brings out the depth in each.
At his latest USM residency, James transformed the Swiss furniture giant's showroom into something that feels like home, filling it with personal memorabilia, family photos, and sketches. I even witnessed a live demonstration of diamonds being set into a gold bracelet, speaking directly to the residency’s title of “In Process.”
James was first introduced to USM through a close friend and quickly fell in love with it. He began sourcing pieces from trusted, if not necessarily sanctioned, sources to piece together a setup for his former Williamsburg showroom long before he had an official relationship with the brand.
Working on the modular set-up himself only deepened his interest. “The flexibility of the units, but also the rigidity of it, I thought was very interesting,” says James.
His official USM partnership began in 2023 with a collaborative collection of home goods: jewelry boxes, leather valet trays, and an incense holder using USM components. The trays were a particular favorite of mine. For this latest residency, however, Bernard wanted to explore the other end of the scale. He’d already made smaller objects with USM, so the next step was to see what he could do with an entire space. And, unsurprisingly, designing and installing the residency uncovered fresh challenges.
“I’m a detail-oriented person, but it’s hard to be detail-oriented in a very massive space,” he says. “It was a challenge I was willing to accept.”
Speaking of challenges, USM is famously strict about how it's represented. It forbids the recreation of its logo on merch, for instance. So, what happened when James brought them an idea, and how much could he push a system with such specific rules?
“Rules are meant to be broken, but not in Switzerland,” he jokes.
It was less about rounds of feedback and more about the people helping James solve problems. Despite the furniture's pleasant rigidity, the USM is warm, invested, and open-minded. “They really care about what they do,” he says. “Working with them has been fantastic.”
James enjoys working within a set of limitations, anyways. Being given specific materials to work with provides a framework for ingenuity. “I treat design as a challenge,” he explains. The result is "In Process," which runs through November 7 at USM’s showroom at 28–30 Greene Street. And "In Process" is very much in its own process, where it'll eventually begin traveling as a kind of itinerant Bernard James boutique spreading the good word from city to city.
