The Rhodium Standard:
Fashion’s New Best Friend
Fashion’s New Best Friend
STIM Precious Metals (SPM) and HENGDI WANG bridge East and West in a spectacular collaboration that shows hope for the future and forward-looking fashion.
September 04, 2025
Le Fool Editorial
Photo (above): Courtesy of Hengdi Wang SS25 Campaign
There has been a lot of talk of walls lately. Walls, fragmentation, and the reversing of globalization. The global economic turmoil and pessimistic quarterly reports of luxury conglomerates make it easy to understand why this narrative of retrenchment is taking hold. The fashion industry, often a bellwether for the cultural mood, has responded by retreating into the warm, comfortable embrace of nostalgia, reissuing archives and playing it safe.
Amidst this downturn, a different kind of conversation is happening. It’s not about building walls, but about building bridges—specifically, a spectacular collaboration between East and West that shows a path defined by hope, future, and forward-looking fashion. Enter designer Hengdi Wang and material innovator SPM, and their audacious project for London Fashion Week: the world’s first jewelry collection crafted entirely from 100% pure rhodium.
As we met to talk about this ambitious project, both Hengdi and SPM’s founders enthusiastically spoke to their shared desire to define a new direction for jewelry and design – one that is not just a marketing ploy but an actual commitment to centralizing fashion on the core foundations of design, technology, and superior craftsmanship. In an era of copy/paste fashion, their collection is a daring rebuttal, both in its design concepts and its technical scope.
Le Fool Editorial
Photo (above): Courtesy of Hengdi Wang SS25 Campaign
There has been a lot of talk of walls lately. Walls, fragmentation, and the reversing of globalization. The global economic turmoil and pessimistic quarterly reports of luxury conglomerates make it easy to understand why this narrative of retrenchment is taking hold. The fashion industry, often a bellwether for the cultural mood, has responded by retreating into the warm, comfortable embrace of nostalgia, reissuing archives and playing it safe.
Amidst this downturn, a different kind of conversation is happening. It’s not about building walls, but about building bridges—specifically, a spectacular collaboration between East and West that shows a path defined by hope, future, and forward-looking fashion. Enter designer Hengdi Wang and material innovator SPM, and their audacious project for London Fashion Week: the world’s first jewelry collection crafted entirely from 100% pure rhodium.
As we met to talk about this ambitious project, both Hengdi and SPM’s founders enthusiastically spoke to their shared desire to define a new direction for jewelry and design – one that is not just a marketing ploy but an actual commitment to centralizing fashion on the core foundations of design, technology, and superior craftsmanship. In an era of copy/paste fashion, their collection is a daring rebuttal, both in its design concepts and its technical scope.
Photo: Courtesy of SPM
“As the body is abstracted out into the world and the world back into the body, there is no longer an isolated existence between the body and the natural and technological worlds.”
Hengdi Wang (on the theory of mechanical evolution)
Jewelry
has long danced to the rhythm of tradition — gold for status, platinum for purity, diamonds for desire. But every era reaches its edge. What comes next is not an iteration, but a recalibration. Rhodium is more than rare; it is technically superior, Iraklis Vlachos says, with a hardness (1,100 megapascals on the Vickers scale) that makes it up to 70% harder than platinum, and a reflectivity that outperforms white gold by up to 30%. It does not tarnish, corrode, or compromise. For decades, it existed only as a thin, protective coating for other metals. Now, it steps into the spotlight as the main character.
The process of making it so was a feat. With no possibility of traditional casting, every stage required custom tools, extreme temperatures, and the hands of skilled artisans to reengineer entire workflows.
Hengdi Wang’s designs manifest this shift in physical form — imposing, sculptural, clarified. Fusing his interest in Taoist philosophy and biomechanics with a focus on material truth, he approached rhodium not as a decorative surface, but as a medium for pure, distilled form. These are not pieces for the mainstream; they are statements of intent for the collector who has moved beyond heritage and into the realm of substance.
And this is where the project transcends the object. As nostalgia maintains its hold, rhodium shows the opposite: a sovereign standard. Much like a digital asset in a post-fiat currency world, rhodium aims to be the post-heritage metal of choice. Where gold once crowned kings and platinum marked exclusivity, rhodium defines a new echelon: post-symbolic, post-status, post-traditional.
And as uncertain times bring the spotlight back on gold as the most stable of investments, can rhodium define the elite of the future – free of a mangled legacy and of the weight of the past? This collection, presented autonomously at London Fashion Week, is a provocation, challenging long-held assumptions about what precious means.
The process of making it so was a feat. With no possibility of traditional casting, every stage required custom tools, extreme temperatures, and the hands of skilled artisans to reengineer entire workflows.
Hengdi Wang’s designs manifest this shift in physical form — imposing, sculptural, clarified. Fusing his interest in Taoist philosophy and biomechanics with a focus on material truth, he approached rhodium not as a decorative surface, but as a medium for pure, distilled form. These are not pieces for the mainstream; they are statements of intent for the collector who has moved beyond heritage and into the realm of substance.
Photo: Courtesy of Hengdi Wang SS25 Campaign
And this is where the project transcends the object. As nostalgia maintains its hold, rhodium shows the opposite: a sovereign standard. Much like a digital asset in a post-fiat currency world, rhodium aims to be the post-heritage metal of choice. Where gold once crowned kings and platinum marked exclusivity, rhodium defines a new echelon: post-symbolic, post-status, post-traditional.And as uncertain times bring the spotlight back on gold as the most stable of investments, can rhodium define the elite of the future – free of a mangled legacy and of the weight of the past? This collection, presented autonomously at London Fashion Week, is a provocation, challenging long-held assumptions about what precious means.
“We’re not here to make jewelry. We’re here to define a new material culture. SPM is not a provider — SPM is an origin. Rhodium is the rarest metal on Earth, and we transform it into wearable form. But what we truly offer is something deeper: a redefinition of luxury itself. A luxury that is sustainable, materially superior, and built around precision, not excess. Our goal is not to replicate tradition — it’s to design the next era of adornment.”
Iraklis Vlachos, SPM
If more creatives and craftsmen like Hengdi and SPM continue to explore this metal in ways that are unexpected, risky, and culturally progressive, then a bright future is ahead for the metal and all those who adopt it early and often. This collaboration is more than a collection; it is a convergence of design and material intelligence, laying the foundation for a new culture of adornment. It is the end of one tradition, and the unequivocal beginning of something entirely new. The revolution has begun, and it wears rhodium