Silver Is No Longer Just for Heirlooms

The artist and silversmith Leo Costelloe’s cutlery appears to be made from silky ribbons, his keepsake boxes are topped with hanks of human hair and his hand-forged sterling vases take the shape of bodega-style paper bouquet wrappers. “I am playing with function and the expectations of an object,” says the London-based Costelloe, 31, who grew up in Australia, studied jewelry design at Central Saint Martins and worked as a florist before starting to sell his own pieces in 2021. “Of all the metals, silver is the most adaptable, and it’s so reminiscent of textiles, which I love.” While the silver spoon has long been shorthand for privilege, he’s quick to point out that he wasn’t born with one of his own. “I’m not from a family that had fine china and silver, so it’s very odd working in this realm,” he says. “Silver was so rooted in class, but that’s changing now.”

Indeed, Costelloe is part of a new generation of silversmiths reimagining the metal for the modern world. Heath Wagoner, 36, started making silver flatware during the pandemic lockdown. Missing the weekly dinners he used to host for friends, Wagoner — who studied metalsmithing as an undergrad and was working as a visual merchandising consultant for Tiffany & Co. — began crafting medieval-looking silver, brass and copper spoons and forks and posting them on Instagram. The enthusiastic response convinced him to launch a full line, much of which looks like it was poached from a 1920s cocktail party. Among his offerings are hors d’oeuvre picks topped with black or white pearls, an elegantly wonky oyster fork and a spoon designed specifically for eating vitello tonnato, the classic Italian veal dish. “Some of it doesn’t seem like it would apply to modern life,” he says, “but if you put out olives in a bowl with a special little silver spoon, people are going to use it and appreciate it.”

Wagoner tempers his love of retro silver pieces and the lost rituals they represent with a taste for avant-garde objects, such as the oversize sardine can he made to serve white asparagus in at a recent dinner. He’s also working on a commission from Virginia Lebermann, a co-founder of the Texas contemporary art museum Ballroom Marfa: a saltine holder crafted from a very thin sheet of 22-gauge sterling, which he’ll shape, solder and hammer to mimic the crackers’ delicate, waxy packaging. The vessel, he says, will have “a beautiful, crunchy paper feel.”

On their recently launched e-commerce design site, Abask, Tom Chapman and Nicolas Pickaerts (both formerly of the now-shuttered British shopping site Matches) sell a more formal take on sterling: newly produced tea and coffee services from storied European makers like Jarosinski & Vaugoin, a sixth-generation Viennese forger that’s supplied royal palaces around the world. Rare antiques are also among the pair’s offerings, including a mid-20th-century jewel-eyed, articulated fish and a solid sterling chewing gum holder from the 1930s. “If you bring out a silver tea service, it slows down time,” says Chapman, 61. “Doing things with such elegance requires a more meditative pace.”