The title came before anything else did. 365, because I was tired of watching love get squeezed into one day on the calendar, wrapped in red paper, and put away again until next February. Love doesn't take a day off. It doesn't know what a calendar is. It shows up on a random Tuesday, uninvited, and it shows up in more than one shape.

That's really the whole idea behind this drop. Eight charms, because I couldn't narrow it down to one kind of love and stop pretending I could. There's the lucky kind, the kind you don't examine too closely in case it stops working. There's the kind that's a little dangerous, the kind that keeps you up. There's the quiet, worn-in kind that's been sitting in the same bed for years and doesn't need announcing anymore. There's the kind you feel for a friend who has known you since you were both a different, worse version of yourselves. I wanted a charm for each one, because none of them cancel each other out. You can carry all eight at once and still be telling the truth.

I spent longer on this brief than on almost anything else we've made, mostly because I kept trying to write it as one feeling and it kept refusing to be one feeling. Every time I landed on a single definition of love, I'd think of an example that didn't fit it, and the definition would fall apart again. Eventually I stopped trying to define it and started trying to list it instead. That's the difference between this drop and a more conventional Valentine's collection. It isn't trying to tell you what love is. It's trying to hand you eight different doors and let you pick the one that's already yours.

The mood behind the shoot was deliberate too. I didn't want soft pastels and hearts on a card. I wanted it to feel closer to skin than to a greeting card aisle, red tights, pearls down a bare back, a cherry held between two fingers, hard shadow instead of soft light. Love, to me, has always been more physical than sentimental. It's in the room with you, not floating somewhere above the room. I remember standing on set watching the pearls shot get taken and thinking, finally, this looks like what it actually feels like instead of what it's supposed to look like on a card.

If I'm honest, this drop came out of a year where love didn't look like I expected it to. Not the kind you plan for, more the kind that rearranges itself without asking permission first. There was a period where I would have told you I knew exactly what love meant to me, and then life quietly proved me wrong about half of it. Writing "365" into the title was my way of admitting that love isn't a single event you can point to and photograph. It's cumulative. It's every ordinary day added up, including the ones that don't feel like anything special while you're in them, the Tuesday you did the dishes together, the argument you had and got past, the message you sent at 2am because you were thinking of someone and couldn't sleep.

I don't expect everyone who picks up a charm from this drop to read all of that into it. Most people will choose the one that catches their eye, the one that looks nicest against their other charms, and that's exactly how it should work. Jewellery doesn't need permission to just be beautiful. But I wanted the idea said somewhere, because it mattered more to me than the metal did, and because some of you will read this and know exactly which of the eight is yours before you've even seen the collection.

Love doesn't get one day. Neither does this collection.

— Paola