From leather to gold weaves to Panama grass and trims, jewelry designers are embracing new materials, experimenting with cloth and fabric. We spoke to five designers to watch.

When jewelry designers push the boundaries of their craft and begin to explore new areas, the result is some refreshing masterpieces. Take the highly sought-after San Francisco designer duo Alex & Lee, whose knot-woven, hand-dyed ropes and tassel necklaces with shells, stones, leather and other finds found their way onto runways and magazines around the world throughout the 1970s.

Today, fabrics and fabrics remain a treasure trove of inspiration for many jewelry designers, who have borrowed these materials and techniques to apply to their own art.

Carolina Bucci comes from a family of jewelers. Her great-grandfather opened the Bucci shop under the Old Bridge in Florence in 1885. Her workshop is still there today. Growing up surrounded by artisans, gold and precious stones, Bucci developed her eye for design at an early age and incorporated her family's valuable talents into her personal taste. "I was thankful for that," recalls the designer, "but I always said, 'Can I translate that into this?' '"

Bucci has transformed the family business in a pioneering way while maintaining the roots of the Italian artisan tradition. Using precious metals, silks and gemstones, she reinterprets simple jewelry designs such as friendship bracelets. In her Woven collection, the designer refines the Renaissance spinning wheels used for tapestry to make gold thread and silk woven bracelets and necklaces.

As with actual fabric weaving, the way the warp and weft are set on the spinning wheel determines the fabric design, resulting in many different style options. Setting up a spinning wheel is a tiring process that can sometimes take up to a week, but Bucci sees it as a privilege to work with a traditional craft. "I'm sure something similar could be made faster and cheaper, but I'm not interested in that," the designer said. "It's important to me that some of the passionate people I explore with produce in Florence."

Ejing Zhang's signature pieces, to the casual passer-by, might look like colorful sheets and blocks of marble. Instead, the Chinese-born London-based designer had to carefully arrange different coloured silk threads inside the mould, which was then covered with resin. She began developing the craft while studying at the Royal College of Art in London. She began by wrapping silk threads around wooden blocks and casting them in resin to create larger accessories and wearable art, but has since evolved to use the process on smaller, lighter pieces of jewelry.

The jeweler started out with flat designs, but for her Autumn/Winter 2018 collection, Ejing Zhang began hand-sculpting round molds, which allowed her to create thicker, curvier shapes. "We bought ready-made stones and used them to make the first molds, which we then tried to replicate," explains the designer. She was inspired by her assistant, Gemma Gibson. Gibson visited Kew Gardens on a rainy day and returned with photographs of dewdrops hanging from plants and raindrops on Windows. These images, combined with 嫕 Chang's interest in mid-century furniture and architectural forms, resulted in an artistic interpretation of an English winter. The collection will be available on Net-A-Porter in September.

Mercedes Salazar's favorite place to visit is the two rooms of her Bogota workshop, where she stores all the beads, shells and fabrics she uses in her jewelry. There, she said, "I could feel my soul and spirit at peace."

The Colombian designer describes her use of different materials as a bit like a chef, mixing ingredients to create new and unexpected flavors, which are reflected in her jewelry as oversized earrings in colorful and novel shapes. Since launching his namesake brand in 2001, Salazar has experimented with everything from leather to blown glass to horse hair to Panama grass. In 2007, she began working with local communities in Colombia to bring traditional weaving techniques to the forefront and promote their preservation.

Sometimes Salazar incorporates raw materials into her jewelry, such as a collection of tropical birds and fruit earrings made from Panama grass. Sometimes the process is applied to new materials, replacing natural fibers with metal or fabric threads.

Designers spend four to eight weeks at a time in these communities, such as Wayyu in Guajira for crochet and Wounaan Nonam in Choco for Urrego palm weaving. "I want to teach other designers how to make artisans part of the production chain," Salazar said of her ultimate goal. "That's the only way to improve their standard of living and give them an income commensurate with their efforts."

Anna Neri and Alessandra Sales used to work at Bvlgari, one in international marketing and the other in external relations -- but they made the bold decision to find another way to be creative together. They shared a love of flea markets and a common aesthetic, so they started a business renovating antique furniture, using traditional decorating techniques like fabric and passementerie.

Then one day, they drew some earrings and made samples, attracting the attention of a stylist friend who encouraged them to move from home decorating to decorating the human body.

With their jewelry produced in Italy, Anna and Alex wanted to "bring back the craftsmanship of Italian artisans with a modern twist." For the Passementerie collection, they asked artisans to scale down the process, creating Art Deco-inspired designs woven from silk, cotton thread and natural viscose.

The pieces are made from traditional spinning wheels or hand-woven, and each piece takes more than two hours to make. Another Arte Miniatures collection is inspired by antique miniature jewellery. Among them are wearable landscape and scene paintings, printed on cotton material and framed in silver or wood.

According to Sales, one of the brand's biggest advantages is working directly with artisans, which allows them to personalize each order, whether it's for a retailer or a private customer. "It's really step by step with them," Sales said. "That's the beauty of it."

Making things has always been Andria Crescioni's hobby, but her obsession with traditional craftsmanship came to a head when she studied fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York. She experimented with different techniques, including batik and hand-woven leather, to create a leather and brass accessories line that was a hit with her 2011 graduation collection, prompting her to switch from fashion to jewelry.

Her iconic designs remain the same simple concept to this day - linear geometry, rounded edges and arcs - all assembled by hand, without the use of machinery, and mostly made by Crescioni herself in her Los Angeles studio. She first created a new metal shape and then tried to wrap leather around it.

She would cut patterns out of the leather, wet them into the metal, and then, while the leather was still wet, cut the stitching holes by hand and sew them in place with a saddle needle. Crescioni has also applied wrapping techniques to other materials, such as palm products, some of which became key to her Spring/Summer 2018 collection, which she collaborated with Oaxaca artist Norma Lilia Cruz Santiago. "There's always room for growth," she said. "I'm excited to see what I can do next."