Is Yoon Ambush the coolest jewellery designer on the planet?

'Everything that used to be underground is mainstream,’ declares Yoon Ambush, the Korean-American jewellery designer beloved by supermodels and hip-hop megastars.

‘Times change, so high fashion has to accept it or get left behind.’ She should know. A decade back, Ambush was just a jobbing graphic designer who spent her downtime making experimental trinkets for friends. Today, that ‘passion project’ has exploded into one of the planet’s hippest streetwear brands, Ambush, a favourite of rappers such as A$AP Rocky, Skepta and Kanye West.

Now she’s in Paris to embark on her latest challenge: heading up jewellery design for Dior Homme, the fashion house’s menswear label. She was announced in the role last month by her friend — and the label’s new creative director — Kim Jones, hence our interview venue, a precious stone’s throw from Dior HQ in Paris. ‘It’s really an honour,’ she says of the Dior appointment. ‘Kim has talked about us working together since his Louis Vuitton days, but honestly, I never thought I could come into an old couture house and make things, because I came out of nowhere. I had no training and no one behind me. In that sense, I always felt like an outsider.’ That may well be but on catwalks right now, it’s the outsiders who are taking control.

From the ascendance of Virgil Abloh — another untrained disruptor turned world-dominating trendsetter — to Vuitton collaborating with Supreme, Ambush’s Dior Homme gig feels like the latest groundswell in a high fashion revolution. When we meet it’s 7pm but her body clock is approaching 2am. She’s come straight to the 8th arrondissement bar after flying in from Tokyo, looking about as un jetlagged as it is possible to look: platinum blonde hair slicked straight back like a Thin White Duke-era Bowie, pale pink T-shirt framed by a black leather jacket and ‘fanny pack’. ‘We belong to a generation of designers who grew up on skate culture and street clothes in the 1990s and 2000s, so naturally it gets manifested in our creations,’ she says. The designer’s label, also called Ambush and named for her desire to take people by surprise, was very much born from this mentality. Created in the late Noughties with her husband, Verbal, one of Japan’s biggest rappers, the pair began making chains and rings purely because Verbal couldn’t find any decent jewellery to blow his royalty cheques on. Neither had any formal fashion schooling: just bags of enthusiasm and a thirst for experimentation.

‘We just wanted to prove we could do s*** no one else was doing,’ she grins, sparkling at the memory of it. ‘We went all out, making crazy, outrageous things. Fifteen-centimetre [wide] Cuban chains... A baseball cap out of bronze.’ Was it actually wearable? ‘Was it wearable...?’ She ponders this over a sip of Coke. ‘Well, yeah, if it fit your head. We didn’t make lots of different sizes...’ These eye-catching (and potentially neck-damaging) items aside, things really caught fire when they unveiled their Roy Lichtenstein-inspired ‘POW!’ rings at the turn of last decade. ‘We really just made them for friends,’ Ambush shrugs, but since Verbal had recently signed to Def Jam Records in the US, those friends now included the likes of Pharrell and Big Sean. Suddenly, the planet’s most style-savvy rappers who were already enthusiastically tapping in to the Tokyo streetwear scene now had an authentic, exciting Japanese jewellery brand to provide their accessories. ‘The rappers really are the rock stars of today,’ Ambush points out. ‘You had movie stars and rock stars setting trends in the past, but it’s rappers now. That’s why streetwear is bigger than ever, and it’s not fading out.

Once Kanye and his ilk were on board, the rest of the world wasn't far behind and the past few years have seen Ambush graduate from tinkering as a hobby to collaborating with Beats by Dre, opening an Ambush store in central Tokyo and, last year, branching out beyond jewellery into apparel. Not to mention designing bespoke pieces for big names including Skepta (that padlock chain the grime star wore on his Naomi Campbell-canoodling GQ cover was Ambush’s handiwork) and partying with supermodels Bella Hadid, Kate Moss and even Campbell herself. ‘[Naomi] is like a goddess in real life,’ she says, laughing. ‘I met her in Korea at a random dinner and then hung out with her in Tokyo. She’s like an immortal being. You look at her and you’re like: “Seriously... how are you real?”’ While she’s certainly not one for namedropping (that Naomi story emerges purely from my nosiness) Ambush does allow herself the odd moment of reflection at rubbing shoulders with music and fashion’s finest: ‘I try not to lose my head over it, but it’s funny: you go out sometimes, look around and think, “Some of these people will be in the history books decades from now.” Like, the way we look at old photos from Studio 54; these are faces of today. I like those moments when you can stand back for a second and just... enjoy it.

Ambush was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1970-something. ‘You can just say “Seventies”,’ she smiles. ‘I think it’s okay to keep certain things quiet...’ That vague air of mystery continues to pervade as we discuss her childhood. Her father served in the US military and when I enquire about his role she purses her pillar-box red lips and chuckles: ‘You know, I should ask him.’ Army life saw the family uprooted constantly and by the time they settled in Seattle when Ambush was a teenager, she had already lived in Korea, Hawaii and California. You can still hear these locations jostling for position in her accent. Seattle was where her ‘outsider’ mentality took shape, and despite holding US citizenship she still describes herself as an ‘alien’

‘Being Asian-American — particularly, Korean-American — there are certain ideals in your community,’ she says. ‘Study well, go to church. But something in me was too rebellious. I didn’t see myself going down that road.’ She has a younger brother, now working in pharmaceuticals, but it was her housewife mother who really encouraged her boundary-pushing spirit: ‘For [my mother’s] generation, going to college was more about meeting the right partner than pursuing your dream career. She knew she would end up being a housewife but I think she wanted more, somehow. So, she told me: “Pursue what you really want.”’ Ambush didn’t need telling twice. As a teenager she immersed herself in fashion magazines and photos of Seventies subcultures: punk, reggae, 2 Tone. She laughingly describes her own style at the time as ‘nerdy emo’ but Seattle in the early Nineties was perhaps the best time and place to work that look, seeing as grunge was being gloomily forged within spitting distance. ‘You’d see Nirvana all the time downtown,’ she remembers.

At 18, she went to Boston to study graphic design where she met Verbal — then just a rap-loving marketing major. The two began dating and when Verbal suggested relocating to his hometown of Tokyo after graduation, Ambush jumped at the chance. ‘The club scene in Tokyo at that time was off the chain,’ she recalls. ‘Hip-hop, electro... Everyone was peacocking so you wore things to stand out. This was before Instagram, so if you wanted to see what a scene was like, you had to go to the clubs. My hair was a different colour every few weeks, I was customising clothes with studs, making jewellery from found objects. Mixing things up.’ Today Ambush’s inexhaustible work ethic allows for far less after-hours ‘peacocking’. Rare downtime is spent at home in Tokyo with Verbal and their two cats, or indulging a burgeoning Korean gangster film obsession (‘You can learn a lot from Mafia movies...’).

That said, the mix-and-match ideology she learned in the clubs is still on display: her just-off-the-plane ensemble includes a silver Rolex, custom diamond earrings and Ambush ball-chain choker. The idea of exploring fresh territory is clearly still what powers the designer’s engine at Ambush (‘We’re making down jackets for the first time,’ she gushes, excitedly). As our time together draws to a close, though, I wonder: how will her playful, explosive spirit fit in at Dior? She nudges her suitcase, which contains the first ideas she’ll be presenting to Jones tomorrow, ahead of her collection’s debut at Paris Men’s Fashion Week in June. ‘Dior’s a heritage brand,’ she explains, ‘so you have to keep the DNA going, but refine it.

I have to find the right balance to complement what they do. But the thing you realise is... there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything has been done. So, then, what is our role as creators?’ As the sun sinks into the Seine, she finishes her Coke and answers her own question for me: ‘To reintroduce things. To make people see them in a whole new light.’