“I’m from Mandan, North Dakota, a town of 15,000. It’s near Bismarck, but the bars are open later,” explains Sarah Fox, who says that she rarely thought about fashion growing up because in her town at that time, being stylish wasn’t really an option. 

She eventually moved to bigger cities—first near Boston to attend Montserrat College of Art and then to Chicago for School of the Art Institute, where she transferred her junior year—and, after studying sculpture intensely, got into housewares and jewelry. 

What makes her pieces pop is her use of out-of-the-ordinary components like lace and twigs—“I’m really interested in transforming material”—and her hard-nosed approach to color. “I hand-paint a lot of my beads, and a lot of people ask, ‘Why wouldn’t you just spray them?’” Sarah says. “It comes down to the fact that this color thing is really important to me. I’m not going to just pick the blue out of the can. It needs have that muted feel.” 

If you were worried, she hasn’t given up on the sculpture thing, either. She still makes some big pieces along with her smaller, wearable ones, out of her studio in Chicago where she lives with her husband, who teaches at the Art Institute and, who, by the way, was her high-school sweetheart.

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