Fortune tellers read palms. Detectives read facial expressions. Peggy Li, a local jeweler, analyzes accessories.
As we sat in her studio at 1890 Bryant — a small, spotless room with a skyline view and a bed for her corgi — she appraised my outfit and recommended I wear something like a necklace she’d made with a thick orange carnelian stone dangling from a chain of large gold links.
She could see I wasn’t afraid of color, Li explained — I was, after all, wearing a pair of lime-green silk áo dài pants. And she’d noticed that I didn’t have my ears pierced. (Li doesn’t either; her mom didn’t want to subject her kids to potential ear infections).
Li, meanwhile, dressed simply in a denim button-down. Her short black hair was pulled into a low ponytail. She had put on one of her delicate gold necklaces, and no makeup.
But if Li doesn’t wear much jewelry herself, she has found a gift in discerning what others might wear. She’s turned this into a business that imagines and creates jewelry for both everyday people and fictional characters in television and movies. The “Eye of the Sun Necklace” she was wearing, for example, is now featured in the Hulu movie “The Supremes at Earl’s All You Can Eat.”
That necklace, Li’s take on an evil eye set in a burst of small gold rays, is a constant in the life of one of the film’s protagonists, Barbara Jean (played by Sanaa Lathan), a member of the trio of friends who grow up together over the course of the story.
Whitney Anne Adams, the movie’s costume designer, said she selected Li’s piece because it fit Barbara Jean, who often feels cursed. The character “has it with her all the time, because she just keeps getting beaten down” and needs a “protector,” Adams said. Also, she added, the necklace has a timeless quality; perfect for a film that spans decades, from 1950 to 2000.
This is not the first time Li’s creations have gone on-air. She says she got her “big break” after offering her jewelry to the costume designer for the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The pieces made it on the show, and are still in demand because of the series’ enduring fandom. Its members, Li admitted, are a bit “cuckoo.”
The “surreal” experience of seeing a piece she’d made by hand appear on TV encouraged Li to pursue her business full-time. These days, Li said, costume designers often reach out to her. Sometimes they ask her to send a wide selection of options. Other times they describe a style — say, “boho chic” — and Li selects pieces to fit individual characters’ personalities.
“Everyone wears clothes every day. So a lot of people think that they have the ability to know what the right costume is, when it’s so much more than that,” said Adams, who has designed costumes for films like Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” and “We Have a Ghost” on Netflix.
The costume designer’s work also involves a bit of psychology: Details like earrings and necklaces that seem unimportant to an untrained eye, Adams said, can project subtle information about a character. That’s why she’s often gone to great lengths to get just the right piece and prefers to feature work by independent artists like Li.
Li said this kind of support from designers was crucial as she transitioned in 2012 from working in online gaming marketing to the arts.
The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who were a “little skeptical” of the stability of artistic pursuits, Li said she hadn’t planned on becoming a jeweler. Not wanting to disappoint her parents, she studied Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
After college, however, Li moved to Los Angeles to work in film and television. Screen-writing became copywriting, which turned into marketing, the industry Li said she found herself in just as the internet was blowing up in 2000. Despite her professional success, however, Li’s “creative bent” still beckoned. After years of making jewelry on the side, she made the leap.
But even as her pieces appeared in several TV shows, including “Arrow,” “Jane the Virgin,” and “The Bachelorette,” Li said she still sometimes felt “artist imposter syndrome.”
“Is this art?” she said she’s asked herself. “Does this stuff belong? Do I belong?”
While it’s taken her a while to be able to celebrate her work, Li said she’s finally found an answer: “If there are people who enjoy it and people who love it, then the creation is worthy.”
Now, Li’s ideas flow freely. When asked what she’d design for a movie about a young reporter (an inspired choice, I know), she envisioned a necklace in seconds: interlocking gold links centered on a delicate gold chain, to represent the character’s curiosity about connections.