School of Design Silversmithing & Jewellery
Ángel Jorge Iglesias
Designer and maker of objects of intimacy in metal and leather
Cover photography by Shannon Tofts
Knight Shift
In a time marked by a crisis of intimacy—where connection is disembodied, love is filtered through market logic and desire takes shape in digital battlefields—I turn to personal experience, the knightly tradition and men’s tailoring to reimagine the uniform of a modern romantic. Knight Shift begins from the bottom up, presenting a collection of male underwear as the site of erotic potential, vulnerability and silent messages.
The pieces are shaped by the metaphors of love-as-gamble and love-as-drug and anchored in the acts of offering, undressing and healing. Worked in leather, patinated copper and silver, the undergarments carry the tactile language of tokens, marks left on bodies by bodies.
A clear progression for Knight Shift would be to expand this intimate vocabulary by adding further forms of body adornment to the armoury and refining the ‘dateness card’ as a tactile invitation in a culture increasingly at a loss for touch.
WIP: On the Body
Building on 20* Objects, this project saw the cards placed on a mannequin and a bed. I challenged myself to transform them from flat shapes into objects with volume, scale and potential as body adornments. This moment marked the turn to an intimate uniform, beginning with male underwear as its first expression.
WIP: 20* Objects
The starting point for my final collection, in this project I explored the card as an invitation to touch. Playing and business cards became platforms for conceptual, material and technical experimentation, testing their potential to tell stories and act as tokens of intimacy. The visual language developed here would echo across the rest of my final-year work.
