Sharon Khazzam
Sharon Khazzam
The New York designer building sculptural coloured-stone work for the contemporary high jewellery market
Sharon Khazzam is an American jewellery designer based in New York whose work occupies a distinctive position in the contemporary high jewellery market: technically rigorous, gemmologically informed, and visually committed to coloured stone in bold sculptural compositions rather than the diamond-centric formalism of much American fine jewellery. Khazzam's pieces are carried by a small number of luxury retailers in the United States and Europe and are regularly featured in the editorial coverage of the trade press.
Background and training
Khazzam established her atelier in New York in the 1980s and has continued to operate as an independent designer and maker without affiliation to a parent house or larger maison. Her training combines bench fabrication and gemmological reading; the work shows the marks of a designer who selects stones in person at the trade level and who understands the cutting, setting, and metalwork constraints that translate stone selection into finished pieces.
The work
Khazzam's signature aesthetic combines large cabochon and faceted coloured stones — tourmalines, opals, sapphires, garnets, and the broader range of secondary species available in fine quality — with hand-textured gold settings and asymmetric compositions. The metalwork is granulated, hammered, or matte-finished rather than highly polished, allowing the stone to read as the dominant element. The compositions favour organic, sometimes biomorphic forms over the geometric symmetries of more conventional fine jewellery.
Earrings and rings dominate the public-facing work. The earrings frequently use mismatched stones — different species, different shapes, different colours — paired in deliberate asymmetry. Rings are sculptural, with the stone as the visual centre and the metalwork as a textured ground. Pendants and brooches appear in smaller numbers and are often singular, custom-commission pieces rather than collection items.
Position in the market
Within the New York high jewellery scene, Khazzam is part of a generation of designer-makers who emerged from the 1980s and 1990s as alternatives to the long-established American houses (Tiffany, Harry Winston) and to the Parisian maisons. Her contemporaries include Cathy Waterman, Judy Geib, James de Givenchy, and the late Ted Muehling, all working at smaller scale than the major houses but at high price points and high stone quality. Khazzam's specific identity within this group is the colour-saturated, bold-scale aesthetic; where Waterman works in delicate antique-revival forms and Muehling worked in nature-derived organic forms, Khazzam works in colour and sculptural mass.
The work has been carried at Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys (during its operational years), and a small number of European luxury retailers and dealer-galleries. Editorial coverage in Vogue, Town & Country, and the trade press (JCK, National Jeweler) has been consistent across the past two decades.