Suzanna Dai’s Spring and Summer 2011 jewelry collections are all about color and nostalgia. The indomitable artisan has spent years of travel seeking out her muse for her distinctive designs, each collection named for its source of inspiration. The designer’s journeys have taken her from Tokyo to Mumbai, from St. Petersburg to the Amazon; in every destination Suzanna Dai is able to extract the soul of the place to create her unique jewelry. Each resultant piece of jewelry is designed and shaped with care and great attention to detail. With her Palm Springs collection, the California based designer has come home to roost.

Palm Springs is described as a place where women emerge from pools, slick as seals and bathed in sunlight. On television, California residents are portrayed as the beautiful people, and their state appears as a series of attractive contrasts: energetic and relaxed; living between activity and Zen, between the warmth of the sun and the cool of the ocean. Suzanna Dai has envisioned the luxuriant lifestyle of the west coast dwellers in physical form, as delicate gold metal beading, criss-crossing over turquoise stones and edged in luminous clear crystals.

The Palm Springs collection pays homage to the eclectic designs of the mid-twentieth century, which featured vibrant color and bold patterns. It brings one to wax nostalgic about a time when American women found the styles they desired hanging in their own closets, rather than on the runways of Paris or Milan. And jewelry is not the only area of fashion where American Style is making a comeback; numerous American inspired designs were featured earlier this year at the 2011 Spring New York Fashion Week.

With America’s renewed interest in her own native architecture and art, new paths will be forged in modern American fashion design. Suzanna Dai is one jewelry designer who is inspiring a resurgence of pride in American inspired design, and it all began in Palm Springs.

Shop the Suzanna Dai Spring and Summer 2011 Collection at Gallery Atlantic.