Meet Yoon Ahn: Dior jewellery designer and all-around visionary

In 2003, director and screenwriter Sofia Coppola chose Tokyo’s Shibuya distruct as a setting for her feature film Lost in Translation. Coppola’s storyline follows Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, as she leaves her eyrie at Park Hyatt Tokyo to explore the city. In Shibuya, the newlywed navigates hectic crowds, passing colourful billboards and towering LED screens, overlooked by a giant, ambling dinosaur projected onto the glass-fronted façade of an office block.

“I have thought about moving out of Shibuya, but I like that this place keeps me on my toes,” says Yoon Ahn. The Korean-American co-founder of independent brand Ambush and jewellery designer for Dior has lived in close proximity to the four-way crosswalk for the past 14 years. Since September 2016, Shibuya has also been home to the first Ambush flagship boutique, which takes up more than 1,500sq-ft of the label’s concrete-built headquarters on Cat Street. “I have been in the eye of the storm ever since,” says the platinum blonde of living and working in the area. “I love the constant flux.”

Ahn was born in Seoul, South Korea in the ’70s; her father served in the US military, and the family moved from South Korea to Hawaii and California before settling in the leafy suburbs of Seattle. “All those places have impacted on me,” she says, reflecting on her nomadic upbringing. “They’re all so different, so each exposed me to many different cultures, ways of living and people. I really appreciate it in retrospect.”

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Aged 18, Ahn left Seattle for the University of Boston, where she enrolled on a course in graphic design. It was on campus that she first met her husband-to-be, a philosophy and marketing student by the name of Young-Kee Yu, better known today as chart-topping hip-hop artist and producer Verbal. The couple left Boston together in 1998, with Verbal embarking on his music career as a member of Japanese hip-hop trio M-Flo, before performing with Mic Banditz in 2002. In 2005, he formed part of Japanese supergroup Teriyaki Boyz alongside Nigo, the founder of streetwear brand A Bathing Ape.

Ambush Design Company was first launched in 2002 as a creative practice, with Ahn drafting album artwork for Verbal and other artists. It was then that the couple crafted their first pieces of jewellery, dreaming up bespoke creations worn by Verbal as the finishing touch to his stage get- ups. Their debut jewellery line, Antonio Murphy & Astro, which launched in 2004, featured unique anime-like creations such as their Beethoven pendant – a miniature gold bust of the composer. Four years later, the duo established Ambush as a contemporary jewellery brand. “Jewellery became a creative outlet,” says Ahn. “I didn’t go to school, nor did I train [in jewellery design], so a part of me is always trying to push and experiment, to see if I can come up with a new way of delivering ideas since rules don’t exist in my head.”

With her designs, Ahn ennobles the everyday. Finding beauty in the easily overlooked, the designer reimagines items including a crushed soft-drink can, a set of locksmith’s keys, a padlock or a wrapped candy, transforming them into talismanic gems, all plated in precious alloys.

Elsewhere, she draws inspiration from popular culture. Since 2012, Ambush has been presenting new jewellery creations in themed collections ;in 2017, the brand made its Paris Fashion Week debut with unisex collections incorporating clothing. Its best-selling design was a speech- bubble-shaped ring in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.

“Our ‘POW!’ ring was the genesis of this journey, so those pieces mean a lot to me,” says Ahn, who has also name-checked John Hughes’ 1985 coming-of-age lm The Breakfast Club (Spring 2018), The Beatles’ White Album (Spring 2015) and all-American outdoor clothing brands such as Eddie Bauer (Autumn 2018) as design references. This spring, a personal trip to Hawaii gave shape to pearl- and crystal-detailed gems, inflatable shark pendants, and necklaces inspired by traditional lei flower garlands, all worn with oversize sun-hats, crochet knits and Neoprene wetsuits.

Ahn's heavy-linked chain CD Icon chain necklace, drafted for Kim Jones' SS19 Dior debut

In March 2017, Ambush was named as a finalist of the annual LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, alongside designers including Marine Serre, Cecilie Bahnsen and London-based talent Molly Goddard. Ahn’s genre-bending work has endeared Ambush to international collaborators: to date, the brand has partnered with Nike, Virgil Abloh’s Off-white, Sacai by Chitose Abe, and Japanese beauty brand Shu Uemura. In 2012, Ahn was commissioned by Kim Jones, then the style director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, to devise a wearable MP3 player – the Playbutton – for the brand.

“I met Kim backstage at a Teriyaki Boyz show sometime in mid-2000 with Kanye [West],” Ahn explains. “[The Playbutton] was a pin that contained ten songs you could listen to – Kim picked five songs and Verbal picked another five.”

Kim Jones was appointed artistic director of Dior menswear in March last year, and, as expected, the ever-inventive designer has shepherded in a whole host of colourful collaborations for the legendary Parisian house. For example, Californian artist Raymond Pettibon sketched fantastical wild-cat prints for Jones’ AW19 collection, inspired by leopard-print fabrics devised by Monsieur Dior himself.

Take a bow: Kim Jones and his jeweller Yoon Ahn at Dior's SS19 Paris fashion week show

For the designer’s SS19 debut, Matthew Williams, the creative director of streetwear brand Alyx, developed a set of metal buckles to fasten Dior backpacks and baseball caps, and American artist Kaws (aka Brian Donnelly) added his take on Christian Dior’s lucky bee motif. Jones’ family-like set-up includes Ahn, who was announced as Dior’s newest jewellery designer in April last year. “I’ve always wanted to work with Yoon,” says Jones. “I love her and her work. She’s very good at looking at the archives, and she’s also business-savvy.”

In her new role, Ahn fashions jewels in line with Jones’ seasonal collections. “We operate like the rest of the Dior team,” she says, explaining her work dynamic with the artistic director. “There’s a kick-off of the collection, and each department is responsible for bringing ideas. Since I do jewellery, I like to wait a little [and] check out what the apparel, bags and shoes [teams] are doing first. I want make sure that what I do complements the whole look.”

Ahn made her Dior debut alongside Jones at Paris Fashion Week last June. When designing her first collection for the house, she drew from Monsieur Dior’s personal life. “The house started in 1946, so there is a super-rich legacy and archives I can turn to reference,” she says. This spring, mementos include a boutonnière pin casting a delicate sprig of lily of the valley in aged silver: “Christian Dior loved flowers, especially roses and lily of the-valley.” Elsewhere, a selection of key rings pay homage to Monsieur Dior’s dog Bobby, including white crystal- encrusted brass bones, and plush pooches with a green, yellow and blue pelt, complete with a tiny logo earring. “It’s important to look to the past, but I believe it’s more important to look to the future,” says Ahn of her irreverent creations.

The designer’s whimsical, archive-led pieces find their match in her chunky, heavy-set CD Icon jewels. A double ring in polished silver features the maison’s initials inset with deep black onyx; silver necklaces are fashioned from initials that are linked to form a chain. Then there are Ahn’s tennis bracelets, which sparkle with multicoloured crystals set in a straight line. “I’m crazy about the Line bracelet,” Jones says of the brilliant accessory. “They’re inspired by a personal bracelet that I like a lot.”

The 2019 Dior Pre-Fall menswear show marked a homecoming for Ahn, as Jones had chosen Tokyo as the location of this year’s spectacle. For the défilé, which unfolded around a supersize robot sculpture by Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama, Ahn dreamt up sci-fi jewellery including articulated silver rings that cover entire fingers. “Men’s jewellery has never been this focused at the house,” says Ahn. “It is a really exciting time right now.”