How Bernard James and Don’t Let Disco Brought Sparkle to NYFW With Their Jewelry Collections

[The tassels can hang from our] Keeper collar, which is a continuous line of hand-sculpted sterling silver, which is now available in gold. The [backstory of] the Keeper is that when I’m in my studio, I have to get out and do sanity walks. I was really inspired by the raw-iron railings that I would see. When we do our bead bars, the bead tenders always have these aprons, and people [want them]. I wore an apron as my purse to the CFDA New York Fashion Week kickoff party. It fits quite a bit and you can also wear it crossbody, which is pretty fun.

Can you share more about your process?

I source beads from every corner: Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Etsy, and a lot of the bead trays that we use are actually ’50s cash register drawers.

When we source materials, sometimes we might have enough to make 19 of something, sometimes we only have enough to make one, and we’ll iterate on the process. Early on it was quite hard to get retail partners to understand that; now they love it. They number the pieces, just like we do on our website.

Something that makes the Don’t Let Disco brand really special is the community around it. We offer these really unique experiences called beading bars where people can come and can craft their own piece. We’ve had this long-standing relationship with The RealReal, where they give us jewelry that’s unfit for sale. We did our first event with The RealReal in November.

[With the beads they gave us for this event], I was like, “Well, why don’t we make it look like food?” So you’ve got the caviar corner. You’ve got little shrimp. You’ve got rock crystal ice. These cement beads look quite like butter.

The show notes are on seed paper, so you can plant them.

What’s next for you?

We’re coming up on five years old, and so I’m feeling the growing pains. When I moved in with my now husband, he was like, “You can have the second bedroom as a studio, but I never want to see you [leave] one single bead [elsewhere],” and he comes home and… I’m still tinkering with it.

We’re opening a showroom-studio space in Dumbo on the first of October; this is the next evolution. We do so many of these in-person activations. We have clients who plan their trips to New York around when they can get a chance to come to the beading bar, and so this is really the next step for us. I’m so excited about it.