Why Óde Uses Titanium: The Material That Changed Season I
Titanium does not appear in most fine jewelry. This is not an accident. The metal resists the standard processes: it is difficult to solder, hard to cast using traditional methods, and it does not behave like gold when you try to work it with the same tools. Most jewelers avoid it for precisely these reasons.
Óde used it anyway. Not as a provocation. Not as a differentiator chosen from a mood board. Because Māris Šustiņš, the artist behind Season I, was working with a logic that required it.
What Titanium Actually Is
Titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. It is lighter than steel and stronger than most metals used in jewelry. Its hardness sits at 6 on the Mohs scale – harder than gold, which scratches at 2.5 to 3, and significantly harder than silver. It does not corrode. It does not tarnish. It is biocompatible, meaning the body does not react to it the way it can react to nickel-containing alloys.
None of that is why Šustiņš chose it.
He chose it because of its colour. Titanium can be anodised – subjected to an electrochemical process that builds an oxide layer on the surface without dye, without coating, without anything applied from outside. That oxide layer refracts light at different thicknesses, producing colours across the spectrum: blues, purples, golds, greens. The colour is structural. It lives inside the surface of the metal rather than on top of it. You cannot scratch it off because it is not a layer in the conventional sense. It is physics.
For a jeweler, this is unusual. For an artist working with the idea of depth, of things that are not what they appear to be on the surface, of materials that carry their own logic – it is the only material that does this.
The Piece Called Not a Bird, Not a Bat, Not a Butterfly
The taxonomy in the title is deliberate. The piece is a brooch. It uses titanium, gold, agate, one white diamond, one blue EcoDiamond® diamond, and one yellow EcoDiamond® diamond. The form is not drawn from ornithology or entomology. It is drawn from the artist’s sense that some things resist the categories we have for them.
Titanium carries the structural colour in that piece. The blue of the anodised surface and the blue of the lab-grown diamond are not matched exactly – they are in conversation. One is grown over weeks in a chamber, the other is produced in an afternoon by an electrochemical process. Both result in colour that exists because of physics rather than pigment.
That correspondence is not decorative. It is the logic of the piece.
The Big Bang: Thirteen Billion Years in Titanium
The piece called The Big Bang uses titanium as the primary structure, with a blue EcoDiamond® diamond at its centre. The description in the collection is precise: Thirteen billion years, set in titanium.
That is not a marketing line. It is a material argument. A blue lab-grown diamond carries a traceable origin: a seed crystal, a plasma chamber, a controlled number of weeks. The titanium around it carries a different kind of origin: the element formed in stellar nucleosynthesis, in the cores of dying stars, before the solar system existed. Both materials, in the same piece, arrived from processes measured in billions of years.
Gold makes a different argument. Gold is ancient too – also formed in stellar events – but gold has been a jewelry material for six thousand years. It carries the weight of that history. A ring in 18-karat gold speaks to every other ring ever made in 18-karat gold. That is sometimes exactly what you want. It was not what Šustiņš wanted here. He needed a material whose cultural weight was lighter, whose surface could be made to change without adding anything to it, and whose hardness would hold the diamond at the structural tension point he had designed.
Titanium was the only option.
Why Most Fine Jewelers Do Not Use It
The production constraints are real. Titanium cannot be soldered with the techniques used for gold and silver. It requires either mechanical fastening, laser welding, or – in Šustiņš’s approach – construction methods that treat the metal as an engineering material rather than a precious one. The tools are different. The training is different. The production timeline is longer.
Most jewelry brands operate on product lines and catalogues. Titanium resists replication. Each anodised piece produces colour at a slightly different depth depending on the electrical charge, the temperature, the exact composition of the oxide layer that builds. Two pieces anodised in the same bath will not be identical. For a brand selling hundreds of SKUs, this is a problem. For a studio making one body of work with one artist, it is not a problem at all. It is the point.
Óde operates on a seasonal model with one artist per season. The structure is described in more detail in the record of how the platform approaches collaboration. That structure is what made it possible to build pieces in titanium. No brief required that the results be reproducible. The artist required that the results be right.
What It Means for What You Wear
Titanium is lighter than gold. A large-format brooch in titanium sits on the lapel without pulling. The structural colour does not fade with wear the way plating would, because there is no plating. The hardness means the surface resists the marks of daily contact in a way that gold does not.
These are practical observations. They are also not why Óde used titanium in Season I. The practical properties were consequences of the choice, not the reasons for it. The reason was that Šustiņš needed a material that could hold structural colour without adding anything, that could be light enough to hang from a lapel without distorting the form, and that did not arrive with four thousand years of symbolic weight pre-loaded.
Titanium was new to fine jewelry. That was useful.
The full range of Season I pieces – the brooches, the rings, the combinations of amber, mammoth ivory, agate, and EcoDiamond® stones – are documented in Collection 01. The titanium pieces are there alongside the gold and silver. They are not labelled as experiments. They are finished work, made to the same standard as everything else in the collection. The material was unusual. The intention was not.