Jewelry Designer Adam Neeley Draws Influence from Salvador Dalí for a Fantastical New Collection
The Surrealist artist’s mesmerizing oeuvre inform hypnotic rings, earrings, and more made with color-rich titanium and jewels
It began, as many good stories do, at a fabulous dinner party. Inspired by Salvador and Gala Dalí’s 1973 cookbook, Les Dîners de Gala, jewelry designer Adam Neeley re-created several of their Surrealist dishes for an intimate meal complete with a theatrical tablescape worthy of the artist. That evening, Neeley dreamed of a Daliesque moonlit garden, where incandescent butterflies hovered above vibrant blooms. When he woke, he began to sketch.
Those drawings would become the foundation for Dalí’s Garden, a five-year experiment in color, technique, and form that pushed Neeley’s craft into new territory. Known for his pioneering ombré work, the Laguna Beach, California, goldsmith set himself an ambitious challenge: translating dreamlike hues into metal itself.
The breakthrough came with titanium. Prized for its strength and lightness, it can also hold saturated color when carefully treated with heat. Neeley’s first creation was the Callara earrings, made in a gradient of electric purples and shocking blues with purple garnets and blue tourmaline gems. “They’re graceful, modern, curving in a way that feels architectural,” he says. “Titanium is one of the hardest materials to
work with, but the goal was to make it look soft and luminous.”
Each piece carries a trace of that original dream, but the real magic lies in the designer’s ability to transform such a hard metal into wearable sculptures that exceed even the wildest of imaginations.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Summer Issue under the headline “Surreal Thing.” Subscribe to the magazine.