“Rick taught me how to keep the integrity of your design and philosophy and to not lose focus,” says Hadar Nornberg, who, after four years working alongsideRick Owens in his “dynamic and inspiring” New York City office recently left to launch her own namesake jewelry line.

And for the 30-year-old designer, who was born in Switzerland, raised in Israel and lives in Paris (on the perennially chic Île Saint-Louis), that focus is razor-sharp. Nornberg’s structural shapes and straight, spiny lines are deceptively minimal, marrying unconventional materials with more traditional elements; her new collection, titled Chess, manipulates plexiglass and onyx with diamonds. She crafts pieces via a complex formula of new design techniques and traditional machine-based methods, where precision is key.

But that precision has not always come easily. “When I was a child, math and engineering were not my strongest,” Nornberg admits. “Rather, it was my love of architecture that led me to always want to be as precise as possible. It became natural for me to create, transform, and analyze ideals of clean surfaces and minimal shapes.” And in an attempt to make those shapes into something a little more evocative, Nornberg, who studied at the renowned Alchimia school in Florence, decided she wanted to turn the diamond—an “obvious, beautiful stone”—into well, something less obvious.

“We all treat and look at diamonds as if they are the most precious things, which is true, but my attempt is to create a feeling that you are discovering a little hidden treasure,” she says, adding that it has been “a wonderful surprise” to see how “very different women, from the arts to business” react to her use of the precious gemstone. “Women from 25 to 70 are wearing my pieces. That in itself is an honor, since my aim is to create jewelry that has no sense of time, yet perceives our time through modern design.”

Her chess-inspired diamond rings, for example, are aggressively linear, constructed to be stacked like a meticulously built jigsaw puzzle for your fingers. “Each piece has its own unique style that reflects the origin of the chess piece,” she explains. A bishop is denoted by a traditional cross, in black or white diamonds, and a queen, by a bifurcated line of the same. And these pieces have some moves that go beyond the chessboard: “The king and pawn can merge together to create new lines and forms,” says Nornberg. Here, we call that a checkmate.

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