There must have been jewellery threaded into the DNA of AGMES founder Morgan Lang’s family. Her late grandmother, who grew up in Mexico, would take her granddaughters—Morgan, as well as her sister, Jaclyn, who would go on to collaborate on AGMES—to markets teeming with silver in her home city after she had immigrated to the US. It spurred Lang’s interest in the aesthetic world as a child. “I remember finding rings in the silver markets with movement and developed an early association between jewellery and play,” she says.  “To this day, I lean more towards silver pieces in my everyday life because it brings me back to the markets, old adventures, and just has tremendous meaning for me.”

Lang then began designing and fashioning her own little necklaces and trinkets at just seven years old, at summer camp. “As long as I can remember, I would sketch pieces wishing I could create them for or I’d collect little things during my travels to make into jewellery,” she says. 

Now, she is the creative force behind the eight-year-old jewellery label AGMES, which designs and manufactures all of its pieces in New York City. Its forms are fluid and sculptural, taking inspiration from disparate (at first glance) forces. Nature, in all its divine and unusual forms, leads the way for Lang, but even more so when contrasted with the warped forms of modernism. “I’m particularly drawn to movement, contours, angles, slight variations, and imperfections,” she says. She cites the work of surrealist sculptors, from Alberto Giacometti to Barbara Hepworth, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Arp, as her inspirations. And, of course, her family.