The story of the Milano Link

Found on a street in Milan in July 2019. Cut in gold that October. We still don't know exactly where it was.

Maison Raksha Journal · Issue Two

A chain slung between two bollards, keeping people off a patch of stone. Painted iron gone to rust at the joints. Nobody looks at these.

We stopped because of the shape of the link. Not an oval. An elongated rectangle that steps inward at the shoulders and squares off at the ends, so each link reads as a drawn form rather than a loop of bent wire. Somebody had decided what that shape should be, probably a long time ago, and then it had been repeated a few hundred thousand times and bolted to a street.

By October the first one was cut in 18k yellow gold.

The photograph. Milan, July 2019.

If you are ever in Milan, keep an eye out for it.

We never noted the street. Somewhere in that city there is a chain slung between two bollards that started all of this, and we would love to know where.

It already had a name

We called it the Milano Link for the obvious reason. Years later we learned the shape has a name of its own in the Italian metalwork trade: catena cattedrale. Cathedral chain. It is still made and sold that way, in iron, in bronzed and blackened finishes, alongside the genovese and the gourmette.

So the form we lifted off a street barrier had been named after cathedrals long before we got to it, and we renamed it after the city without knowing. We are not going to pretend that was intentional.

What we can't tell you is how old that particular chain was, who cast it, or which street it is on. It is still there, presumably, holding people off the same patch of stone.

One link showing diamond, the next showing ruby. The same chain.

Two faces

The Milano Link is double-sided. Two stones set into each face, four to a link. The first chain we made carried ruby on one side and diamond on the other.

A chain does not lie still. It turns against the skin all day, and a link finished on one face only spends half its life showing you the back of itself. Setting both sides is not generosity. It is the only way to make a chain that is never accidentally switched off.

Worn, the two faces fall where they fall. Red, white, red, white, in no order anyone chose.

What the holes do

Most of this chain is nothing. That is the point of it.

The link is long, and the opening inside it is long, so more of the run is air than metal. A heavy chain sits on you like an object placed there. This one lets the neck through it. Skin shows in every link, which means the chain never reads as a separate weight laid on top of a person — it reads as something the light and the body are moving through.

The stepped shoulders matter here too. Because the sides pull in before the ends flare, each opening is not a plain slot but a shape with a waist. Set them end to end and the voids come at you in a rhythm: long, pinch, long, pinch. Your eye follows the gaps rather than the gold. That is unusual. Most chains ask you to look at their metal.

It is also why the stones work at this scale. Four small stones per link would disappear on a solid chain. Here they sit on the only solid ground there is, framed by emptiness on both sides, and they read from across a room.

Colour

Ruby and diamond was the first pairing, not the only one. The setting bed on each face takes a small baguette, and a small baguette can be almost anything.

So the chain has been made in pinks, in greens, in blues, and in runs where no two links match — one stone per face, repeating down the length in whatever order the client wanted. Because the metal between the stones is so thin, the colour is not an accent on a gold chain. It is most of what you see.

White gold, colour throughout, pavé clasp.

Nobody's idea of a men's chain or a women's chain

Jewellery gets gendered by its softness. Curves and clusters read one way, weight and width read the other, and most chains land firmly on one side or the other before anyone has picked it up.

The Milano Link comes from architectural ironwork, so its geometry is square-shouldered and structural — and then it is cut small, opened out, and set with stones. It is holding two things at once that usually cancel each other, and the result belongs to whoever puts it on. We have made it in 10K and 14K, in yellow, white and rose, as a necklace, a bracelet, and a band. The shape has not needed to change for any of them.

One link, on its own

Run end to end, the link is a chain. Set one on a plain cable and it becomes something else entirely: a single stepped rectangle sitting flat on the collarbone, with nothing around it competing for the eye.

This is the quietest thing we make from the shape, and the one people wear every day. The link is small enough to disappear under a collar and specific enough that anyone who knows it will recognise it across a table.

The clasp is part of it

Most chains hide the fastening at the back of the neck, because on most chains it is the ugliest component. Ours is set, pavé on every visible face, and built at the same proportion as the links it closes.

That means it can be worn round the front, which is how we make it and how most people end up wearing it. The chain has no back.