Don’t Let Disco Brings Practical Magic to the Jewelry Box

This fashion month, designers dropped hints at a very mystical spring, from the witchy dusk-colored swaths of chiffon at Colleen Allen to the mermaid-coded minaudières at Chloé. Ashley Moubayed’s jewels for Don’t Let Disco make it easy to tap into that spirit. The brand’s second fine jewelry collection, The Opening, conjures up practical magic with found objects, sun-charged crystals, and the shimmer of desert diamonds.

“I always say I come from a line of witches,” Moubayed tells me on a Zoom call from her studio in Dumbo. She’s sitting in front of a wooden apothecary cabinet salvaged from the Bowery Hotel renovation, filled with vibrant stones and antique baubles. As she speaks, I catch myself ogling her silver Totem chain necklace, loaded up with charms including amorphous pearls, an antique cigarette canister, and the rock crystals known in the jewelry world as “pools of light,” which were believed in the Victorian era to hold magic within their illusive shadows and refractions. The translucent orbs were the impetus behind Moubayed’s first fine jewelry collection last spring. Looping them into necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, she used 19th-century wire-wrapping techniques to keep their powers fully intact.

“Everything we do is meant to be built upon,” Moubayed says. I take notes as she hangs a quartz bangle-pendant askew on a link of her Totem necklace. It brings a Calder-like flavor of asymmetry to her eclectic jumble. Her ability to bring harmony to a clamor of shapes, mobile elements, and organic textures is enhanced by her background in art and design. Prior to launching Don’t Let Disco five years ago, Moubayed worked at Sotheby’s, where she spent five years directing marketing strategy for an array of antiques, such as rare books, Renaissance paintings, and decorative arts of the 20th century.

“If you talk to any of my old colleagues at Sotheby’s, they would tell you that anytime we were doing a photo shoot, I always wanted to do something that was curio cabinet themed.” She accumulated tons of design catalogs filled with midcentury modern furniture and objects, such as Jean Royère’s surrealist end tables and light fixtures, and Jean-Michel Frank’s rounded chairs clad in natural textures.

“I think you start to see how much conviction was in these certain eras of design and that nothing was accidental,” Moubayed says. “Everything was very proportional and considered and materials—they really meant something. And I just find myself endlessly drawn to the confidence of these different periods, whether it's mid-century modern or it's the deco obsession with geometry and repetition.”

Strokes of Art Deco and midcentury influence come through in her mixed-media medleys. On our call, she holds up a wooden pompon tassel punctuated with showers of smoky semiprecious stones. It transforms a substantial string of beads into a sautoir—a staple of flappers who draped them over bias-cut evening gowns and drop-waist dresses. Such confections coexist with a galaxy of streamlined pieces kissed with 1960s space-age aesthetics. “Universe pendants” feature vibrant semiprecious stone discs that look like faraway planets, shrunken to palm-sized dimensions. Framed in thin wires of silver, they dangle like interstellar wonders from sterling “Keeper collars” that retain a smooth elliptical shape.

Moubayed has always had a thing for rocks, an obsession she can pretty much pin down to a book her mom gave her from the Cleveland Children’s Museum that detailed the science behind different formations. She remembers stashing rocks she found in a kitchen drawer of her childhood home. “One day, my mom opened it, and an avalanche of rocks spilled out,” Moubayed says. “My solution was that I'm not going to stop doing this, I'm just going to bring home less. I would be out and think, ‘Oh my God, there's seven rocks here and I can only take three!’”

Her tendency to fall smitten with objects is an occupational hazard of being a Libra, she says, but her collector’s gene is deeply rooted in her maternal bloodline, starting with her grandfather. During his career at the United States Postal Service, he chronicled a comprehensive collection of stamps honoring historic Black figures, most of which didn’t print until the initiation of the Black Heritage stamp series in 1978.

While her grandfather curated this archive, her grandmother collected buttons of diverse textures, colors, and sizes to craft fluid mosaics of floral bouquets and landscapes. Her grandmother’s ability to see potential in unorthodox materials is one of the niche traits they share. “My grandmother was my best friend,” Moubayed says. She spent her teens sourcing jewelry from thrift stores, disassembling them, and reconfiguring them into new bracelets, necklaces, and earrings. The ties between their visual language extend into her keen sense of smell. “(My grandmother) would literally hug you and knew who you had hung out with,” Moubayed says. The trait has led to her curation of Frederic Malle perfumes, which she mists on Don’t Let Disco packages as another personal touch.

She’s equally inspired by literature. One of her favorite books, Great Expectations, comes to mind whenever she’s conjuring up one-of-a-kind pieces in her studio. “Which character are we designing for today?” she’ll ask. “Is it the whimsical and kind-of-crazy Miss Havisham? Is it the practical and earnest Pip? Is it the mysterious and elusive Estella? Who are we designing for?”

It’s a mindset that influences each step of design. You’ll seldom find a literary hero who doesn’t have flaws, and she selects stones in the same way, embracing them wholly with all their charm and imperfections.

In the earlier stages of Don’t Let Disco, she visited one of her lapidaries on 47th Street who had a business carving rings out of gemstones and became enamored by a bin full of discarded rings that had been damaged at the jeweler’s bench. Like a person’s freckles, dimples, or laugh lines, the misshapen edges and dings were little slivers of personality that gave them a unique sense of beauty worth appreciating. She had an idea to string them into longer strands. Of the first batch she bought, she found herself particularly drawn to a rock crystal ring with damage that exceeded sellable viability, so she set it aside for a necklace she would make for herself.

“Do you know that this particular necklace is the one, of all the pieces I wear, people always want this precise one? I remember actually Sherry McMullen (of McMullen Boutique), when she first saw it, she said, ‘Oh no, we have to have that one for the store!” Ashley recalls. “I'm like, ‘Sherry, there's only one!’”

Quartz has long been associated with metaphysical properties of magnetism, whether it’s rock crystal or rose quartz. Different cuts of the stone appear often in Moubayed’s work, from crystalline Totem charms to the Victorian pools of light she introduced in her former collection.

A longtime friend recently dropped off a necklace she had gifted him four years ago at her studio for repair. In the interim of fixing it, she gave him a replacement necklace to wear. One day, he called her and said, “Ashley, I love this necklace, but when I was wearing that first necklace, I found my dream apartment. I fell in love, and I also got my dream job,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I need that back ASAP!’” It was a beaded necklace of quartz, baroque pearls, and a ceramic evil eye charm. “He's back in his necklace, and he is loving it.”

Her studio is filled with other stone modalities. Lapis for healing, citrine for abundance, onyx for grounding, too—there’s something for everyone. It’s one of the reasons she hosts beading bars, where she invites clients into her studio to choose from bowls of beads to build their own creations.

“I've never been able to meditate. I've always been a little bit insecure about that,” Moubayed says. “But when I am beading, and when I'm doing things with my hands, I feel so at peace with the world. I feel so comfortable and so safe.”

Her new collection celebrates self-expression, cultivated within her haven of craftsmanship and artistry. “I like to cater to the collector, and if you're collecting something, I want you to be able to have all these different reconfigurations of it,” Moubayed says.

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