Mignon Faget · New Orleans
A city worth
looking at.
A red bean.
A ribbon.
A railing.
Ordinary things, until someone gives them an extraordinary amount of attention.
Mignon Faget gave the familiar forms of New Orleans another life. What I admire most is the generosity of her eye.
Look at what is already here
The red bean
gets its turn.
There is a lovely confidence in finding something worth keeping where other people have only seen something familiar.
A red bean is an unusually good place to begin a conversation about a jewelry company. It brings the discussion down from an abstract idea of luxury to something someone might recognize from a kitchen.
Mignon Faget introduced the red bean in her Louisiana collection in 1973. I love the implied invitation: look again at the things you already know. The everyday world has been holding a few possibilities in reserve.
A bean does not arrive with the usual credentials of a jewel. It has no impressive scarcity story. It is not particularly interested in impressing anyone. In New Orleans, it has a perfectly respectable life as dinner.
Faget saw a form she could work with. That act of attention gives the piece a second life without erasing its first one. The wearer can enjoy the shape and still recognize the kitchen, the meal or the place it calls to mind.
That is a much more intimate relationship with a city than simply putting its name on an object. A name tells you where something belongs. A familiar form can help you remember what belonging feels like.
I think this is part of why her work deserves a longer look. It gives the things people live among the dignity of being noticed. You do not have to leave home, or leave your ordinary life behind, to find a subject worthy of an artist.
The artist before the design house
The shells wanted
a life of their own.
Faget graduated from Newcomb College in 1955 with a fine arts degree. Her first ready-to-wear collection arrived in 1969. The jewelry grew out of the clothing: she sculpted silver shells as accessories, and visitors to the studio began asking to buy them as pendants.
It is a wonderfully human beginning. An artist is making one thing, somebody notices another, and the work opens a door the original plan may not have fully described.
I like the visitors in this story. They were paying attention, too. The shells had enough presence to make people imagine wearing them beyond the clothes they accompanied. A conversation between maker and wearer was already underway.
That exchange matters because design has two lives. There is the life an artist gives it in the studio, through material, proportion and workmanship. Then there is the life somebody else gives it by choosing it, wearing it, giving it away or keeping it for years.
Faget’s training in sculpture helps make sense of that first life. A pendant has weight, volume and an underside. It moves against a body. It must be considered from more than the flattering angle in a photograph. The small scale makes the decisions intimate.
The pleasure of transformation
A soft thing,
remembered in metal.
Movement held still.
Texture given another life.
The 1976 Knots collection explored the tension and movement of fabric. For the Five-Knot Cuff, Faget dipped cloth strips in wax and wound them around a mandrel, preserving the appearance of the textile in the finished form.
This is the sort of detail that makes an artist’s process worth reading about. Cloth is supposed to bend. Metal has a different set of obligations. The design asks one material to remember something about the behavior of another.
You can imagine the decisions inside that translation. How much texture should remain? Where does a fold become too busy? What does the form do when it wraps around a wrist? Those questions give substance to the broad word creativity.
They also reveal an affection for the original thing. To translate a material well, you have to pay attention to its habits. The artist studies how it gathers, where it resists, how a little tension changes its character.
There is humor in that kind of observation, too. The Animal Crackers collection, introduced in 1975, found its starting point in the familiar cookies. Faget made room for play within serious work. I find that combination reassuring. A person can care intensely about making something well and still enjoy the subject.
Her architectural work carries the same curiosity into the street. Colonnade, introduced in 1983, drew on the details of classical column capitals. Ironworks, in 2006, took inspiration from French Quarter ironwork, including the Cabildo’s balconies.
A building belongs to a scale larger than a person. A bracelet belongs to the body. Moving between them requires more than making the building smaller. The designer has to decide which rhythm, curve or opening holds the feeling of the original.
That makes a city an unusually rich companion for a working artist. You can live beside a detail for years before you become ready to use it. Your eye changes. A material suggests a possibility. Something you passed yesterday becomes the beginning of tomorrow’s work.
New Orleans is often described through its famous pleasures. Faget’s history adds the sustained pleasure of looking. The place becomes a source of forms to study, remember and carry forward.
For a wearer, the connection can remain wonderfully private. Somebody else might see an interesting piece of jewelry. You might see a place you know. Both experiences can occupy the same small object.
The city at the scale of the body
Something you
can carry
with you.
A living body of work
What gets
passed on?
A design house bearing one person’s name eventually holds the work of many people. That is a profound kind of inheritance: the name stays familiar while new hands take responsibility for what it means.
Maghan Oroszi, the company’s CEO, worked with Faget and was mentored by her. In a 2024 interview with JCK, Oroszi described the work of carrying the founder’s identity into the continuing life of the brand, with new designs alongside the established ones.
I think the most useful thing a founder can leave a creative company is a way of paying attention. An archive gives the team objects to study. A working method gives it somewhere to go.
The Tulane collaboration announced in November 2025 offers a concrete example. The company interpreted the university’s wave motif as a pendant, pin and earrings. Oroszi and Tulane’s Carmen Sarduy wanted an artistic interpretation that belonged to both institutions. Faget’s own Newcomb history made the connection personal.
That is an appealing way for a legacy to keep moving. The institution, the designer and the wearer each bring a history. A new object gives those histories a place to meet.
The people doing the making belong in the story as well. The company describes a process that includes models, molds, casting, soldering, polishing and the handwork of stringing pearls. An idea passes through skilled hands before it can become somebody’s treasured possession.
There is care in that passage. A founder’s eye can inspire a drawing; another person’s judgment makes the edge comfortable, the surface convincing, the finished object ready for a life outside the studio.
The value of looking again
The familiar still
has something to say.
The company calls its customers Collectors. It is an appropriate word for work that can gather meaning over time. A person may remember who gave them a piece, when they first wore it, or the version of themselves who chose it.
That meaning belongs to the wearer. The design makes room for it. I admire a company whose work can be recognizable without dictating every feeling somebody should have about it.
Mignon Faget’s story brings me back to the red bean. It was already here. So were the shells, the cloth and the railings. The remarkable contribution was an artist’s willingness to look closely, followed by the work of giving that attention a form other people could keep.
A city is fortunate when someone helps its people see how much they already have worth caring about.
Rob
A few useful details