Paint It Black

By Benjamen Judd

We rave on a lot about how much we love colour and bright things and fun. But that doesn’t mean we have forgotten those years we spent dressed from head to toe in black, wore combat boots to formal dinners and listened to community goth radio late at night (this was wear we first London After Midnight…still good).

So every now and then in the midst of a vomit of rainbow clothing we long for those old days when things were a shade darker. This is where Kester Black comes in handy.

Based in New Zealand, Kester Black was launched in 2009 by jewellery designer, Anna Ross, who specialises in using silvers, white gold and hand carved wood. She also uses oxidisation techniques, creating a blacked range that is perfect for our goth-revival moods (it’s like in that film Mean Girls and on Wednesdays they wear pink but for us it’s alternate Thursday’s and we wear black).

Anna produces two collections per year and she has a distinct aesthetic that exudes throughout her work. Anna makes rings and necklaces that use the fragmentary shape of splinters and shards and her hand-crafted bear and bunny necklaces look like something passed down from generation to generation starting at the Great Depression. They are fantastic.

You can buy Kester Black direct from her website, here, or you can head to Desordre located at 323 South Dowling Street in Darlinghurst to try some of her pieces on.