Fashion has always been Leandra Medine Cohen’s currency, one she largely issues herself. First through Man Repeller, and now through The Cereal Aisle and Café Leandra, she has built a career not simply by wearing clothes, but by changing how other people perceive them. Her influence comes from making an object feel newly desirable through context: an unexpected proportion, a strange combination or a way of wearing something that makes you look twice. A three-carat diamond on her toe is not interesting only because of where she placed it. It is interesting because, once she wears it, the idea somehow begins to make sense.

LMC Fine turns that ability into something more tangible. The project is rooted in Medine Cohen’s own family history. Her father worked in jewelry for decades, while her maternal grandfather had a jewelry business in Iran. But rather than building a conventional fine-jewelry house around this inheritance, she has developed the work through a series of collaborations. A four-piece collection with Audry Rose, Summer Diamonds with Yael Aflalo’s New York label Aflalo, and the Romani cuff created with photographer Alexei Hay each bring different materials, expertise and creative perspectives into the project. Medine Cohen may be its central author, but the work does not pretend to have emerged from one person alone.

It would be easy to read this as another fashion personality converting influence into product. In some ways, it is. But what makes the project more interesting is that the product is not separate from the source of her influence. Medine Cohen has always treated getting dressed as an argument about value: why one thing feels right beside another, why an awkward proportion can be more compelling than a flattering one, and why taste often begins where accepted rules end. The jewelry applies the same logic to a category still heavily governed by tradition, ceremony and permission.

Diamonds appear on toes, thumbs and higher up the arm. They are set into sterling silver, mixed with coral, turquoise, amethyst, opal and wood, or sunk flush into the metal rather than raised above it for presentation. In the Romani cuff, created with Hay, three diamonds of three carats each sit in silver rather than platinum. In Summer Diamonds, developed with Aflalo, lab-grown stones move across parts of the body without established jewelry traditions. The diamond remains precious, but it is no longer required to perform preciousness in the way we have been taught to recognise it.

What draws me to the work is also the tension between masculine and feminine codes. Flush settings, signet-like forms and heavy silver sit beside diamonds, coral and brightly coloured stones without one side softening the other. The pieces do not try to resolve the contrast. They become more interesting because both can exist at once.

Fine jewelry has historically arrived with meaning already attached. It is given, inherited or used to mark an occasion deemed important enough to justify it. What Medine Cohen and her collaborators propose is not that diamonds should mean less, but that the wearer can participate more fully in deciding what they mean. A stone can remain valuable while being set in silver, worn with a grey sweatshirt, placed on a toe or bought for yourself on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.

Perhaps this is the natural conclusion of Medine Cohen’s particular kind of influence. She is not simply designing objects. She is placing them into her own system of value, where instinct can matter more than convention and wanting to wear something can be reason enough. Fashion may have always been her currency. With LMC Fine, she has started minting it in metal.