Isolde

Only End One Way

The Isolde does not look away. From the Old Welsh Esyllt — she who is gazed upon, the one you cannot stop looking at — her name has carried the weight of the greatest love story in Western literature for over eight hundred years. She is the sculptural figurine that makes looking feel like longing, and longing feel like the most alive you have ever been.

Free my soul to feel alive

The legend of Tristan and Isolde predates Romeo and Juliet by four centuries and has never been surpassed for the sheer, consuming totality of its desire. Isolde was an Irish princess, a healer, a woman of extraordinary power — betrothed to King Mark of Cornwall, a man she had not chosen. Tristan was sent to escort her. On the crossing, they drank a love potion — by accident, or by fate, or because some things are going to happen regardless of what you do to prevent them. The legend has never been able to decide. It does not matter. What followed was inevitable.

Their love was not a choice. It was a condition. It consumed everything around it — loyalty, duty, honour, the careful architecture of the lives they had been given — and it did not apologies. It could not. It was too large for apology. It ended, as the greatest loves in literature always end, in death — but the kind of death that feels like completion rather than loss. 

Wagner heard this story and wrote Tristan und Isolde — the opera that changed music forever. The opening chord is left unresolved for four hours. It is the most famous musical expression of longing ever written. It is still unresolved. Some things are.

The Isolde carries all of that. The gaze. The longing. The love that was larger than everything built to contain it.

What makes her impossible to look away from

• Named from the Old Welsh Esyllt — she who is gazed upon, the one you cannot stop looking at
• The Irish princess at the centre of the greatest love story in Western literature — four centuries older than Romeo and Juliet
  
• Limited edition — because a love this total arrives only once

The Isolde is for those who have always understood that the most beautiful things are the ones you cannot stop looking at, and cannot explain why.