I create things that are new and unusual in ways that haven’t been done before.” As statements go it’s gloriously bold and direct. Confident. Essentially, it’s Maria Tash in word form, and Tash is a woman of her word.

The native New Yorker is the long-reigning “ear queen” – luxury body piercer, jewellery designer and retailer, coiner of the phrase “curated ear” and pioneer of ground-breaking techniques in her field, including invisible set diamonds and threading.

No less than Queen Rania of Jordan has worn her designs, and Tash’s fans include Marietta Hallani, Hailey Bieber, Rihanna, Kylie Jenner, Ashley Graham, Florence Pugh, Ayo Edebiri, Taylor Swift and Cardi B.

It’s been 31 years since Tash opened Venus Modern Body Arts in 1993 on Fourth Avenue in New York’s vibey East Village: “Very, very off the beaten path.”

“I put ads in the local papers and people trickled in. I cannot tell you what people entrusted me to do back then,” she says with a laugh. “All the cool East Village denizens would come in and get pierced. There were a lot of stylists who were working with actors and models, who would ask them, ‘That’s really great, where did you get it?’”

Dubbing the ’90s New York scene “crazy and fun and experimental”, the designer admits her journey from the anonymity of Venus Modern Body Arts to the eponymous Maria Tash was a decade in the making.

“I was afraid to put my name on the door,” she says. “It became Venus by Maria Tash, then I dropped
the Venus, Eventually, I wanted recognition for the work I had done. It took me probably ten years or
more before I did that.” Tash defines her childhood forays into jewellery less as an early obsession and more as an “inclination”.

“I was putting on a lot of my mum’s jewellery,” she remembers. “I would go into her case and throw it all on.” However, it was the design element that stuck. “I was drawing flowers. My first designs were very floral.”

“My mum took me to a jewellery class when I was nine, and I remember bending copper into bracelets and hammering into a criss-cross design,” she says. “Around 13, I got some cheap jewellery wire, which I crocheted with to make a little purse. I look back and think it was pretty good. I still have it.”

Like many aspiring designers before her, Tash’s fashion compass soon swung towards London, where she spent two terms at King’s College complementing her US studies at the elite Barnard College, Columbia University, and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

“That was very influential,” she says. “A lot of the music I liked was coming out of London, and I thought the style was more outlandish than anything I had ever seen, even more so than Manhattan.” 

Citing the “very out there” style she found in mid-’80s London as an inspiration, she recalls weekends spent trawling the markets at Kensington and Camden and soaking up the capital’s multiculturalism, in particular the many Indian stores and boutiques. This resulted in her getting a nostril piercing and a gun. Not a real one, of course – though that would suit her frequent cowboy analogies – but instead a piercing gun.

With two patented piercings, the Tash Helix and the Tash Hidden Rook, Tash’s appreciation for the stylings of the transverse lobe and her firm belief in piercing to complement an individual’s ear-natomy leads to her frequent musings about where next for earscaping. “I was like, we can make something look like it’s emerging,” she says of her love for subtle piercings that aren’t immediately visible. “People weren’t thinking of cloaking or things like that, which I was. I love the idea of emergence.”

“Not having the first hole lobe pierced, but only having some of the other piercings I think is a very avant-garde take on ear jewellery, and I love that. I think it says something about a person’s creative and risk-taking side,” she adds.

But with the ear taking up only a finite amount of cranial real estate, are there still artistic and curatorial avenues to explore?“Yes, of course there is,” she says, waving away the question. “You’ve just got to open your mind.”

An open mind is what landed Tash in the Middle East, and she now counts stores and concessions in Riyadh, Kuwait and the UAE among her global compendium, which includes but is not limited to New York, Dublin, London, Miami, Dallas, LA and Paris.

“The whole region is a little cowboy,” she says of the Middle East, neatly summing up the let’s-do-it frontier energy and reputation for risk-taking. “I mean, the concept of this desert melting pot with the tallest buildings in the world… It infuses into our line of work.”

“In the Middle East, I feel like they embrace everything. It’s a market where I can really test things out and get an accurate read – it’s not so segmented,” she says. “I feel like whatever I dream up I can put out here first and see the reception in the market because I feel the clients here like what I like. We look at things and say: ‘Dubai’s gonna love this!’”

“I think that’s why I’m here, why I’m on earth – to create,” she muses. “It’s what I’m good at, what I like doing the most.” A lament follows: “I just need to work out how to spend more time doing that.”

With plans for an apparel line and whispers of exciting collaborations with global jewellery and beauty brands in the pipeline, she rolls her eyes good-naturedly, aware that her current lack of design downtime is a first-world problem.

“I always rebel when I hear the word ‘trend’,” she says, in what feels like a defining moment. “‘Trend’ implies that I like it now and it’s going to go away. But it’s not a trend, it’s in the Maria Tash world. One of the many things that are unusual.”

mariatash.com