If you look at the very bottom of the LÖF website, you will find a Spotify button alongside the other social media platforms where the fine jewelry brand Morgan Mackintosh launched can be found.
Do yourself a favor. Click on it.
With her unique career in music and production, Mackintosh created ethereal, moody, sonically gorgeous playlists for several pieces of LÖF jewelry. The one for the Fitzgerald cigar band is particularly perfect for writing, in case you were wondering.
LÖF has many influences—love, mathematics, architecture, interior design—but music is one of the most prevalent, given Mackintosh’s melodious background in everything from pop to commercial jingles to co-writing and producing a musical.
“Initially, I only designed jewelry on the side. I had started studying gemology, still not thinking I’d be able to break away from music, but the pull toward designing and making it my career grew even stronger,” Mackintosh says. “Finally, between the birth of my daughter and working in an uninspiring job, I drew down from my savings and invested in myself…for the first time ever.”
Mackintosh grew up in London with her parents and sister; they lived in Chiswick, a leafy area in West London.
“My parents worked in the restaurant business, and the rest of my family were in the music and theater business. I was always around food and music, which is probably why they are my greatest obsessions, along with jewelry,” Mackintosh says.
Her first jewelry memory is of her mother’s gold necklace—a distinctive chain link that is part of the inspiration behind LÖF’s André necklace.
“She would come in late at night from working at the restaurant she owned with my dad, and I just remember it hanging down when she came in to kiss me good night,” Mackintosh says. “It is such a nostalgic memory, and probably why the André is one of my favorite pieces.”
Mackintosh attended high school at St. Mary’s Calne in Wiltshire, working with friends at a café and a clothing shop. That shop is where she says she started to take note of different styles—of things she liked and didn’t like—and her interest in fashion bloomed.
“I also learned how to fold jeans. I had to fold hundreds. It was hell,” Mackintosh says. “The main thing I learned from these jobs, though, was independence and responsibility—something that was probably needed after a fairly sheltered school experience. And it taught me that folding jeans wasn’t for me.”
Her first job after college was at a music studio and production house called Xenomania, where owner Brian Higgins wrote for a range of successful artists. As a team, they spent long days collaborating and creating.
“I learned so much about harnessing creativity and finding it in unexpected places, which is probably why I look in unexpected places for inspiration in my jewelry design,” Mackintosh says.
Next, she worked for Eclectic, which wrote and produced music for commercials. There, Mackintosh says she learned about patience and disappointment, as this part of the music industry is extremely competitive. During an interlude between jobs, she co-wrote and produced a musical, which had a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival.
Her final job before moving to the United States was at Music Concierge, which offers sonic branding and playlists for bars, hotels, and restaurants. She then relocated to Los Angeles, working for Sencit, which writes music for movies and television trailers.
Mackintosh says her earliest high school sketches made while daydreaming in class are surprisingly similar to the ones she makes now for LÖF. Her studio shelves are stuffed full of books on interiors, geometry, and architecture.
“I’ve always loved looking through those kinds of books, and it is where I now draw so much inspiration from when it comes to designing,” Mackintosh says. “My geometry texts range from basic Euclidean principles to complex non-Euclidean concepts. I find myself returning to vintage mathematical diagrams from the 1950s, where clean line work and precise measurements reveal the hidden poetry in angles and intersections.”
The other shelves are full of architecture tomes. Mackintosh says she is drawn toward that industry’s most revolutionary moments: Le Corbusier’s radical visions, the confident symmetry of art deco skyscrapers, and the uncompromising honesty of brutalist structures.
“Books featuring the work of Carlo Scarpa show how concrete can be elevated to art through thoughtful details, while texts on Louis Kahn demonstrate how light becomes a building material in its own right,” Mackintosh says. “I have so many folded-down pages marking structures that have influenced collections—a particular stairwell spiral that inspired a ring or the rhythmic window pattern of a Boston library that inspired a set of earrings.”
LÖF is the sum of all these parts, including her daily walks, her phone’s chaotic camera roll, and her maximalist expressions of style. The brand’s unique name comes from one more influence—her family, using her and her husband’s term of endearment “I loaf you” as its earliest iteration.
“Bigger is better, and nothing is ever OTT. There is no such thing as clashing in jewelry,” Mackintosh says. “I like combining dainty pieces with bold pieces, mixing styles, mixing colors and metals, stacking rings, even if they aren’t meant to be stacked. You can’t go wrong when wearing jewelry. More is always more.”
Top: Morgan Mackintosh spent her early career in music and creates playlists for some of her LÖF jewelry (photos courtesy of LÖF).
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