Shiny Style is crushing on Joy Hikade

This summer, Allison Pearson published her second novel “I Think I Love You”, following the puppy-love lamentings of Petra, a teenage girl growing up in 1970s America and nursing a huge crush on the teen-idol of the time, David Cassidy. Though I can’t relate to being in love with David Cassidy (I really don’t get it – his smile frightens me), “I Think I Love You” made me feel all wistful and nostalgic for a time long lost, a time of kissing my Leonardo DiCaprio posters every night before I went to sleep, a time of writing love letters to all of the members of A1 (my favourite was Ben, the one with the big forehead and the curtains).

I suddenly found myself revisiting all of the extreme and occasionally ridiculous celebrity crushes that I’d suffered from in my early years; if I remember correctly my first love was when I was five, and the lucky fella was Mighty Max, that cartoon character with the back-to-front cap that was mates with an owl and had magic powers or something. I liked Thomas the Tank Engine too – he had nice eyes – but my last true freight-train sized crush was Kurt Cobain, whose sallow, stubbly face filled up every space of my bedroom walls for two years in my early teens and haunted my dreams every night. I wrote “Mrs Emily Cobain” all over my notebooks, wore T-shirts with his face emblazoned on them for days on end and drew endless sketches of him and me holding hands. In hindsight, all mortifyingly embarrassing, but I know that I was not alone – it seems every girl in the world has at least once suffered from the phenomena that is the Celebrity Crush.

It’s this nostalgia for the era of puppy-love and teen idolatry that makes me love the jewellery of Joy Hikade so much. A California-turned-London girl, Joy makes and sells her rock-and-roll themed earrings and bangles featuring the faces of such retro crushes as Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers for six pounds a pop. Each piece is hand-made so that you can be sure no-one else will have the same one as you, and can also be bespoke on request. If you feel like channelling your inner fanatical teen and want to let the world know it with your jewellery, check out the gallery below to see examples of Joy’s work.

If you like Joy’s work and want to buy one of her pieces, she sells her stuff at:

The Runway Showroom
Arch 62/63
Camden
London
NW1 8AH

For those who don’t live in London, well.. now you’ve got an excuse to go, haven’t you?