Designer Anna Jewsbury Melds Contrasts and Constants

London-based artistic director Anna Jewsbury aims to take her brand Completedworks to a place of newness.

To be seen through Anna Jewsbury’s eyes is to be reinvented.

The British-Filipina designer’s home, for one, is a picture of thoughtful eclecticism: angular furniture offset by delicate touches, lime-washed walls in one room contrasted by a plaster-like finish in another. It might be surprising to learn, then, that the space was once a converted pub originally built in the 1820s. Except it really isn’t all that unusual, not when Anna is added to the equation. In an old London property that looked worse for wear, she recognized potential and made a home.

Anna grew up in Holmfirth, an old West Yorkshire mill town best known as the backdrop of the long-running British sitcom Last of the Summer Wine. “I didn’t really appreciate [Holmfirth] when I was younger,” she admits. But it seems home always finds a way to win us over in the end. Despite being headquartered in London, the rolling hills and vast landscapes of Holmfirth have become a source of inspiration for Anna.

“The thing about nature is that you can never understand it at a fixed moment in time, which I really love,” she reveals to Vogue Philippines. “Landscapes are fluid, water flows.”

Even as words on a stark white screen, her pointed observations paint a vivid picture of what her mind sees. Reflective and perhaps a little sentimental, the way Anna perceives the world around her is distilled in her multidisciplinary brand, Completedworks.

From left: Actor Diana Agron, artistic director Anna Jewsbury, and writer-activist Lily Cole.

Worn by the likes of Adwoa Aboah and Emma Watson, there’s a clear magnetism to the various forms Anna’s curiosities take. Through jewelry and homeware, she creates a visual code that bridges the soft and rigid. The destination, ultimately, is a place of newness.

“I often find myself searching for opposing forces,” Anna says. Consider Completedworks’ first collection, which featured pieces crafted from reclaimed marble. A soft stone by textbook definition, fragments of the material were hand-carved to resemble the smooth facets and fluted edges of a broken pillar. Other collections have since featured hard metals and ceramics molded to resemble fabric in motion, a snapshot of kinetic energy.

A decade later, this intentional selection of media, as well as juxtaposing it against some sort of antithesis, remains a brand signature. “When it comes to a specific idea we want to explore, it’s often about finding the material that offers the right resistance to convey the idea,” Anna explains. As the theory goes, the medium is the message.

For Completedworks’ SS25 collection, messages turned tactile through clustered pearls and crystals arranged in grid-like forms. This marked a new exploration for the brand, “a bit bolder and more strict” than their typical shapes and motifs. Anna also dialed back to her love of contrasts, reworking silver into curves and bends that cradled the body. Also in the collection: a sculptural bucket bag fashioned from deadstock leather.

Breathing new life into existing materials is no novelty for Anna and her team. Reclaiming and repurposing are key elements in the work, with recycled sterling silver present making up the majority of their metal jewelry.

Campaign photographs by Lena Emery. Show photographs by Genevieve Lutkin

The theme trickles down to their homeware, too. Among their most recent accouterments are sculptural candlesticks and martini glasses made completely from broken bottles and windows. In their second life, these pieces would complete the tablescapes at the brand’s celebratory dinner in Paris, hosted in celebration of their London presentation weeks prior.

“If you’re launching a brand in the current landscape, there is no other way to do it really,” offers Anna. Sustainability and impact are part and parcel of the process. Helming a brand like Completedworks equips Anna and her team with the ability to tell tangible stories, and perhaps just as importantly, the liberty to choose the parts that eventually make up the sum. And while unbridled freedom can all at once be terrifying and empowering, Anna is glad to go along for the ride.

What is Completedworks through Anna’s lens of perception? In her words, a slow burn. Having recently received the British Fashion Council Trust grant and a nomination for British Accessories Designer of the Year, victories are aligning for Anna and her team. But through it all, their pursuit of reinvention remains unflinching.

“One thing I love about our industry is that it charges you to run with ideas that are surprising or unfamiliar,” she muses. “I get to explore ideas that interest me and run with that, which feels like an inestimable luxury.”