CGD

In 2022, Veronika Ďuricová’s brand Dick Wolf was nominated for the Czech Grand Design Awards for the Marina collection. The professional jury appreciated the quality of craft, authentic style, relaxed creative process and coherent development of artistic expression and concept of the brand.

The collection is trendy in a good way, mirroring the relevance of the fluid morphology of metal and irregular freshwater pearls, as well as a move away from abstract geometry to concrete shapes. It also touches on personal spirituality and small private rituals, a theme of increasing importance in the predominantly atheistic Czech everyday life.

Marina was created as an imprint of a place, with limited technological possibilities and intimate emotions, during an August stay by the sea in Rijeka, Croatia. It hints at what luxury means to the author and to the young generation in general: to have total freedom in their work and to work where they feel best at the moment. The artist decided to combine work with holidays, bought portable burners and used holes in rocks as moulds on the beach.

She combined casts of the shapes of the coastline with objects washed ashore, which intrigued her with their texture and shape. This is how necklaces, earrings and rings were created. Personal amulets, which, as with the previous collection, count with the participation of Scent Roche perfumes. Stones worked by the sea soak up the fragrance and, alongside their specific salty odour, release it slowly over a period of two weeks. Concrete fauna motifs, such as a crayfish or a wolf, appear in the collection alongside abstract natural shapes.

Dick Wolf likes to isolate herself from outside influences during the creative process. And although Veronika Ďuricová is a graduate of AAAD's Concept Object Meaning studio, she doesn’t like questions about the concepts behind her work. She says it is spontaneous free creation shaped by life situations, specific places and technological limits. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, her designs are in tune with the aesthetic waves of broader global contexts.

A kind of visual untidiness and "imperfection" of her jewellery shapes has become sought after in the last two years in the context of the cottagecore and craftcore trends. Nostalgia and the home production of personal jewellery made from grandmothers' necklaces became rampant among Gen Z during Covid. Old jewellery stores and influential celebrities like ASAP Rocky swept up the wave of pearlcore, and strings of iridescent stones flooded women's styling, but very much men's as well.

An interesting insight on the popularity of pearls at a time when people are going through the stress of a global pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a growing economic recession is offered by the sought-after American brand Mudd Pearl: "The way a pearl is created is similar to the human condition of alleviation. The oyster creates a smooth coating around a small trauma in order to co-exist with it and each method of protection is so individualized it could never be exact. Holding a pearl is like holding a physical manifestation of one's own resilience." In this context, the great popularity of the irregular and seemingly imperfect yet unique shapes of freshwater pearls makes perfect sense.

From the global context, we return back to domestic soil. So far, Dick Wolf's work is known mainly among Czech design scene aficionados. Although it is a young project by a recent AAAD graduate, last year the Von collection was one of the three finalists of the jewellery competition at Czech Grand Design Awards and the project was also awarded at the Designblok festival.

A necklace from this collection showed how distant Czech young design is from the local media mainstream and the general public (despite professional awards). As part of Radka Třeštíková's outfit at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Dick Wolf necklace sparked a storm of ironic memes that reminded us what a powerful tool the styling for the red carpet is, how potentially explosive it is in the viral world, and other things, too. It was interesting to see the reactions of the general public, for whom this necklace was a collar borrowed from a dog, while the professional bubble considered it a great design. 

The bizarre viral moment had no effect on the notoriety or business of Dick Wolf. All the attention was taken up by the public grilling of a famous woman's appearance, style and personality, which unfortunately showed a wide range of shades of misogyny, male gaze and mansplaining. The whole thing, in my opinion, is a telling reflection of the level of public discussion and awareness when it comes to design and fashion in this country.

Veronika Ruppert