The Sign Is Only the Beginning

Everyone inherits categories, among them a birth month, a sign, a generation, a place in a family and a hometown that people use as shorthand for who you are. None of us picked these, and most of us have been read through one of them before anyone asked what we thought.

I know this well. Gen X is a category, and it is the one I have built a good part of my work around, from the books I have written to The Thinking Circle. I did not choose the label. I have spent years deciding what it means and what it leaves out.

That is the thinking underneath The Twelve. A zodiac sign is a category with a long history, assigned by the date you were born. When I started designing the collection, I did not want to treat it as a verdict on anyone’s personality. I wanted to treat it as a starting point and see what happened when I made my own decisions from there.

Each bracelet begins with a sign and, where it made sense, with a traditional birthstone. After that I built outward one stone at a time, choosing the color, proportion and contrast myself. Gemini and Leo came out looking nothing alike, and that is the point. Twelve categories do not have to produce twelve versions of the same thing.

Every one of those decisions was mine. Nobody told me what Libra should look like. The traditions gave me somewhere to begin, and they did not tell me where to end.

The person who buys one of these makes the same kind of decision again. She may choose her own sign, the sign of someone she loves, or a bracelet that has nothing to do with her birthday because the composition looks like her. Each of those is a good reason to wear it. The sign offers a starting point, and the person wearing it decides what it means.

I think the same applies to most of what we inherit. A label can be a useful place to begin, and it becomes a limit only when we stop making our own decisions about it.

So here is the question I keep returning to. Which of the categories you were handed have you actually decided about, and which have you simply been living inside?