Fat Free: Tessa Packard Presents Her New Сollection

Tessa Packard’s love of jewellery and her acute desire to start-up and run her own company led to her eponymous line Tessa Packard London. This Brazil-born self-taught designer has recently come up with her new collection, Fat Free, to be launched this spring.

Tessa has, very cleverly, turned sugar grains into diamond and made calories quite cool in this series of trendy jewellery. Taking a detour from the classic style that she is known for, the new line draws inspiration from childhood memories and sweet cures for a sugar rush, with fried eggs and pears thrown in for a healthy gemstone diet. On behalf of katerinaperez.com Smitha Sadanandan talks to Tessa Packard about the Fat Free collection and Tessa’s love for penny sweets.

Smitha Sadanandan: What inspired the Fat Free concept?

Tessa Packard: Fat Free is primarily inspired by my love of English penny sweets – the nostalgia of buying them, their colours and engaging designs. It is also a collection that explores popular culture, its relationship with art and design, and the playful narrative behind it: the idea that a low cost, perishable item such as a penny sweet can be the source of something timeless and beautiful. Fat Free also draws on my experience of buying gemstones, and how the selection process recalls a memories of carefully picking out penny sweets as a child in my local sweet shop with as much consideration given to size and colour as one would expect from a jeweller buying diamonds.

SS: The Pear, Sunny Side Up Egg, Ginger bread man and the Evil tooth fairy are playful pieces. How did the narrative for these designs come into play?

TP: As with all of my collections, the designs are a culmination of a lot of research into the theme and narrative at play. Nothing is superfluous; every detail has been well considered. I used diamonds in this collection to visually evoke the sugar crystals or sugar powder found on confectionary and deserts. The range of Sweet-Shop necklaces and bracelets (the 18ct gold vermeil pieces) are designed to be hand-picked and layered together as they wish to re-enact childhood memories of selecting sweets in a sweet shop. For this reason, I purposefully designed the necklaces so that the charms would hang at different lengths, allowing you to wear two or three simultaneously. There is a range of cabochon-set stacking rings in the Fat Free collection called the Pick N’Mix selection and I have used cabochon stones that look like hard-boiled sweets. For me, narrative integrity is of utmost importance.

SS: Was this a collection you always wanted to work do?

TP: I had always wanted to do a collection inspired by sweets, perhaps accidently or consciously. Also, I had quite a few of the right stones in stock for many of the pieces. Of all the collections I have designed, the Fat Free has certainly been the most effortless. I do not know whether this is because I have a sweet tooth or because the designs just felt unbelievably right from the start.

The designer also does bespoke jewellery, details of which are available on her website. For a glimpse of her standout pieces and latest designs, visit Tessa Packard website.