Serge DeNimes Armour Turns Protection Into Something You Can Wear
The London jewellery label looks to the spine, ribcage, veils, serpents and ancient talismans for a 22-piece collection examining the things we carry for protection.
Protection usually implies distance: walls, shields, layers placed between the body and whatever exists beyond it. Serge DeNimes approaches the idea differently. In Armour, its new 22-piece sterling silver collection, protection sits directly against the skin.
A ribcage becomes a ring. A spine wraps around a finger. A veil is frozen in silver. Serpents, sacred symbols, goddesses and talismanic objects move across necklaces and signets, transforming jewellery into a small vocabulary of defence.
It is armour stripped of battle and returned to something more personal.
The Body as Architecture
Some of the strongest pieces in Armour begin with the human body itself.
The Silver Rib Ring reduces the structure of a ribcage to four curved bands of oxidised sterling silver. Beside it, the Silver Spine Ring follows a repetitive vertebral rhythm around the finger. Neither piece attempts to reproduce anatomy literally. Instead, Serge DeNimes borrows the logic of the body: structures designed to support, contain and protect.
That distinction gives the collection its tension.
Jewellery has always been attached to the body, but Armour asks what happens when the body becomes the jewellery too. The things normally hidden beneath skin are brought to the surface and turned decorative.
Elsewhere, protection becomes less anatomical and more instinctive. Scale and reptile textures run through rings, an earring and the collection’s most substantial piece, the Silver Reptile Bracelet, where individual textured links form something closer to a flexible exoskeleton.
Rendered primarily in oxidised 925 sterling silver, these surfaces are deliberately tactile. They feel aged rather than pristine, as though the objects have acquired histories before reaching the wearer.
When Jewellery Becomes a Talisman
Armour moves between physical protection and something harder to define.
For thousands of years, jewellery has carried responsibilities beyond decoration. Objects have been worn for luck, remembrance, faith, status and imagined protection. Serge DeNimes draws directly from that history without committing itself to one belief system.
The collection moves freely between ankhs, Christian references, serpents, protective inscriptions and figures associated with fortune.
The Silver Fortuna Ring and corresponding necklace feature a goddess of fortune, while the Holy Ring and Holy Necklace place symbols of love, sacrifice and peace inside a crown of thorns. The Silver Protect Necklace is more direct, turning the language of protection itself into the object.
Then there is the Silver Immortal Necklace, a cluster of symbolic forms that reads almost like a collection of found amulets accumulated over time.
These pieces are less interesting as declarations of belief than as evidence of our continuing desire to attach meaning to objects.
Armour understands that jewellery can exist in that emotional territory without needing to explain everything.
Veils, Stone and Softness
Not every form of protection in the collection appears hard.
The Silver Veil Ring and Silver Veil Necklace translate folds associated with sculpted marble into sterling silver. Faces appear partially obscured beneath flowing surfaces, producing pieces that seem caught somewhere between concealment and revelation.
In the lookbook, the Veil pieces are among the collection’s most sculptural designs. Silver behaves almost like fabric, allowing something normally associated with softness to become solid.
It introduces another interpretation of armour.
Protection does not always need to resemble a shield. Sometimes it is privacy. Sometimes ritual. Sometimes the decision to reveal only part of yourself.
Material shifts reinforce the same idea. Black onyx appears within the Serpent pieces, camouflage jasper interrupts the otherwise monochromatic collection, and cubic zirconia is embedded into reptilian surfaces. These stones do not turn Armour into conventional gemstone jewellery. Instead, they interrupt the silver, functioning almost like fragments embedded into an archaeological object.
The overall effect remains deliberately imperfect, textured and physical.
Fifteen Years of
Serge DeNimes
Armour arrives fifteen years after Oliver Proudlock founded Serge DeNimes in London in 2011.
That anniversary gives the collection additional weight.
Rather than approaching it as a retrospective, the brand has used protection as a way of returning to an idea that has followed jewellery throughout history: why we choose to keep particular objects against our bodies.
Proudlock describes Armour as the label's most personal exploration yet, concerned with physical and spiritual protection and, ultimately, “the strength we carry within.”