Cynthia is wearing handmade mixed-media pieces from 1988-94

Cynthia Rybakoff knew what she wanted to be at the age of ten.

As a child in the early seventies, Cynthia would visit the homes of women who made jewelry and spend hours combing through their collections. The colors and patterns of beads from across the globe became her passion. Teaching herself to string necklaces and form earrings, she moved into hand-cut wood painted and adorned with decoupage with mosaic beads and rhinestones. In 1985, she sold her first wearable art pieces to a trendy shop on Columbus Avenue.

In 1987, a chance introduction to Isaac Mizrahi, led to a collaboration of six seasons designing jewelry for his runway. After that first collection, the phone started ringing. Editors wanted to photograph it for top magazines like Vogue and Bazaar. Stores like Barneys New York and Bloomingdales wanted to feature pieces they saw on the runway. Other designers called to ask if Cynthia could create jewelry for their collections. It was, as she puts it, the 1980s version of going viral.

From there, a career began that would take her through hundreds of magazine spreads, collaborations with over 25 designers including Oscar de la Renta and Geoffrey Beene, and roles as the jewelry designer at Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. Style icons Mary McFadden and Carolyne Roehm collected her work.

In 2025, Cynthia celebrated forty years in the industry. She has preserved over a thousand pieces from her original collection, dating from 1985 to 1994, and an archive of materials going back to the 1970s that she pulls from to this day. In her sixth decade as an artist and designer, her obsession with materials has not faded. If anything, it has deepened, along with her conviction that beautiful jewelry should outlast every trend.