© Marlene Haase 2026
Trained across the worlds of European fashion and New York design, Haase has carried a lifelong fascination with material from the runway into fine jewelry, where craftsmanship, cultural context and longevity now define an evolving creative language.
For Marlene Haase, the evolution from fashion to fine jewelry has never been about leaving one discipline behind for another. Instead, it has been a gradual refinement of the ideas that have occupied her throughout her career: the character of materials, the intelligence of craftsmanship, and the ability of a designed object to carry meaning beyond its immediate appearance. From her early education in Berlin to her professional life in New York, Haase has developed a practice shaped less by the boundaries between fashion, accessories and jewelry than by an enduring curiosity about what materials can become in the hands of a designer.
Today, Haase works as a jewelry designer at Lorraine Schwartz in New York, where she contributes to both collection pieces and bespoke creations, including jewelry developed for high-profile clients and major cultural occasions such as the Academy Awards, the Met Gala and the Grammy Awards. It is a position that places her within the highly specialized world of fine jewelry, yet the sensibility she brings to it was formed across a much broader creative landscape.
“I have always seen the different design disciplines as closely interconnected,” Haase says. “In both fashion and jewelry, I am particularly drawn to exceptional materials—their inherent qualities, the craftsmanship they require, and the possibility of creating lasting pieces that tell a story around them.”
That instinct can be traced to an upbringing in which creativity was part of everyday life. Haase’s mother is a photographer, her aunt an architect, and her grandparents worked as an illustrator and creative directors. Photography sets, fashion, accessories, art and design were familiar territory long before she began considering how those worlds might inform a career of her own. But while creative surroundings provided an early vocabulary, formal education taught her how to interrogate it.
At the University of the Arts in Berlin, where she studied fashion design, Haase encountered an environment that emphasized research, fashion history and the wider cultural forces surrounding design. The experience encouraged her to think beyond the immediate aesthetics of an object and consider the histories and systems embedded within it.
“My professors had an incredible knowledge of fashion history and the wider cultural context of design,” she recalls. “There was a very inspiring atmosphere of exchange, experimentation, and exploration.”
Professional experience soon expanded that perspective. Haase worked with Viktor&Rolf in Amsterdam and Walter Van Beirendonck in Antwerp, as well as with New York designer Melitta Baumeister. Each environment exposed her to a different creative language and a different understanding of how an idea is translated into something physical. Her involvement with accessories proved particularly consequential, drawing her toward the territory where fashion begins to behave more like object design and where material, construction and scale assume a different kind of importance.
Rather than viewing fashion and jewelry as separate creative worlds, Haase came to understand them as related forms of expression. Both concern the body. Both depend on proportion, material and craftsmanship. And both have the ability to communicate something about the person wearing them. The distinction, for Haase, increasingly became less important than the questions shared between them.
Her move to New York marked a significant point in that development. Haase enrolled in the MFA Fashion Design and Society program at Parsons School of Design, entering a city where fashion, art, photography, performance and design continually intersect. If Berlin had established the intellectual foundations of her approach, Parsons pushed her toward a more individual design language while reinforcing the collaborative reality behind creative work.
“A collection is never created in isolation,” she says. “It involves working with stylists, photographers, producers, craftspeople, and many other creative minds to bring an idea to life and communicate it in the right way.”
Her graduate collection, presented during New York Fashion Week in 2022, demonstrated how thoroughly research and material had become intertwined in her work. Its starting point was cotton, a material so commonplace that its enormous cultural history can easily disappear behind its familiarity. Haase became interested precisely in that contradiction. Cotton is ordinary and ubiquitous, yet its history is inseparable from questions of labor, industrialization, global production, fast fashion, sustainability and environmental responsibility.
“It is an incredible material because something that seems so simple carries such a complex history and touches on many political, social, and environmental issues,” she says.
For Haase, those issues were not supplementary references added to the collection after the fact. They informed the design process itself. Cotton became more than a textile; it became a way of examining how an everyday material can embody histories much larger than the object eventually made from it.
The collection brought her work wider attention, appearing in publications including Vogue Runway, V Magazine, Document Journal and Sleek, while ICON examined the social and environmental ideas informing her approach to cotton. Yet beyond the visibility that followed, the collection established something more fundamental about Haase’s creative identity: her tendency to begin with material and work outward, allowing its properties, associations and history to influence the eventual form.
“Material has always been a starting point for my work,” Haase explains. “I am interested not only in its visual or physical qualities, but also in the stories, history, and associations it carries.”
That philosophy makes her eventual movement into fine jewelry feel less like a dramatic change of direction than a logical continuation. The materials may now be gold, gemstones or onyx rather than cotton, but the underlying curiosity remains remarkably similar. A precious material arrives with its own history, limitations and possibilities. The designer’s task is not simply to decorate with it, but to understand what it permits and what kind of object it can become.
New York provided the environment in which that transition could fully take shape. Haase initially arrived in the city for Parsons, but remained because of the creative ecosystem she found there.
“For me, New York is one of the most inspiring cities in the world,” she says. “There is creative energy everywhere.”
For Haase, inspiration in New York is as likely to emerge from an unplanned encounter as from formal research. A visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art might offer the opportunity to examine historic jewelry and centuries of craftsmanship; a subway journey can reveal an unexpected combination of clothing and accessories worn by a stranger. The value lies in the coexistence of those experiences, and in a city where designers, artists, photographers, stylists, models and craftspeople continually move through one another’s worlds.
“There is also an openness to new ideas and individuality that I find very special,” she says. “You can dress however you want, experiment, and develop your own identity without feeling that you need to conform.”
At Lorraine Schwartz, Haase’s work now brings together many of the principles that have followed her through fashion. Developing a piece of fine jewelry is an exacting process in which the apparent effortlessness of the finished object is achieved through considerable technical precision. An idea may begin with research and sketches before progressing into detailed renderings, technical drawings and three-dimensional prototypes. Proportion, structure, stone placement, fabrication and wearability must all be resolved before a design can exist successfully in precious materials.
“Bringing a piece of jewelry to life is a very detailed and collaborative process,” she says. “It is very rewarding to see an idea that started as a drawing gradually become a finished piece of jewelry.”
The collaborative nature of that process echoes what Haase learned earlier in fashion. A designer may establish the initial language of an object, but realizing it depends upon specialized craftspeople and technical expertise. In fine jewelry, where minute adjustments can fundamentally alter how a piece sits, moves or reflects light, the distance between a compelling drawing and a successful finished object can be considerable.
Bespoke jewelry introduces another dimension. When a piece is intended for an event such as the Oscars, Met Gala or Grammys, its eventual context is already part of the conversation. The jewelry must exist as an object in its own right while also entering a larger visual composition involving clothing, color, proportion, occasion and, at times, the personality of the person who will wear it.
“You know what outfit it will be worn with, the colors, the occasion, and sometimes the personality of the person,” Haase explains. “That creates a more direct exchange and can influence certain design decisions.”
There is an unusual tension in designing for moments of such intense visibility. A piece that has taken significant time and expertise to develop may enter public consciousness through a single appearance. Photographs travel almost instantly; fashion is discussed, assessed and replaced by the next cultural moment. The jewel itself, however, remains.
It is this quality of permanence that appears to have become particularly important to Haase.
“What particularly fascinates me about jewelry is its permanence,” she says. “I strongly believe in quality and longevity, and I consider it a privilege to work with precious materials and create pieces that can be worn for generations.”
The observation reveals an important distinction between jewelry and much of the contemporary fashion system. Fashion is often organized around change—the arrival of another season, another collection, another image. Fine jewelry can operate according to a much longer measure of time. A piece may remain with its owner for decades before passing to another person, accumulating memories and associations that its designer could never have anticipated.
Even when a jewel is eventually altered, its materials can continue their lives. Gold can be reworked. Gemstones can be removed and placed into new settings. A piece can be transformed without its fundamental material value disappearing. For a designer whose work has long examined what materials carry with them, this capacity for reinvention has particular resonance.
Haase describes the stages of her career as part of an ongoing process rather than a series of disconnected chapters. “I think what connects all these stages is a constant process of exploration and finding my own direction as a designer,” she says.
That continuity is perhaps the most revealing way to understand her work. Berlin taught her to investigate the cultural histories surrounding design. Her experiences with Viktor&Rolf and Walter Van Beirendonck placed her inside distinctive professional fashion environments. Parsons gave her space to consolidate research, experimentation and personal authorship. New York brought those influences into proximity with an expansive creative community. Fine jewelry ultimately provided a medium capable of concentrating many of those interests into objects where material, technical skill, personal expression and longevity meet.
The progression from cotton to gold might appear, at first, to represent two very different creative lives. In Haase’s work, the distance between them is considerably smaller. Both begin with attention. Both require an understanding of what a material already is before deciding what it should become. And both reveal her resistance to treating material simply as surface.
The difference is time.
Jewelry has given Haase the opportunity to create within a medium whose significance can extend far beyond the season—or even the person—for whom it was originally conceived. In that sense, her movement toward fine jewelry has not required abandoning the questions that shaped her work in fashion. It has allowed her to pursue them with materials capable of carrying their answers much further.
For Marlene Haase, design is ultimately not only about creating something worth looking at. It is about creating something worth keeping.
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