You might recognize his work from Nicki Minaj's gilded breastplate, worn in her latest video for "Ganja Burns." 

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It&#39;s been a while! How was the process of creating it after having that gap of time?

HABANA: It was definitely a little bit nerve-racking because I had to bring back all the old instincts of what we could&#39;ve done before. What we used to show, all of that was more of a re-surprise for me. So, it didn&#39;t really sink in that we had to be &#39;this involved&#39; into this thing until we got about halfway into it and we were like, &quot;Wait a minute! This is a show - I gotta really get into this!&quot; [laughs].

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Did Century 21 contact you first and it took from there?

HABANA: Ruth is a good friend of mine. She&#39;s at Century. Basically, she had asked me if I wanted to show here as part of their summer program and I jumped at a chance. We would never have shown because we&#39;ve done so many collaborations throughout the seasons with fashion shows and such.

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Tell me about the collection&mdash;what was the vibe?

HABANA: So basically, I look at this collection as a culmination of the past ten years. There&#39;s a sexual element which I&#39;ve always done, there&#39;s a medical and science element that we&#39;ve always done, I always love that mad scientist vibe. It resonates with me! We had first started with, like, goth in 2008, so I kind of wanted to go back to that. So, there&#39;s even this religious and pagan theme in there, as well. We just wanted to bring that back up as well.

I know you primarily work with silver. Why is that a kind of metal that you feel most drawn to?

HABANA: I&#39;m definitely more drawn to silver as a metal. However, with me doing so many collaborations with Opening Ceremony and all that, it&#39;s kind of opened up to do other kinds of metals. We just did the Nicki Minaj bra for her music video which was all just super gold. So I&#39;d like to think that we&#39;re more of a studio than a fashion brand or anything like a&nbsp;brand. We basically get in there and fulfill every kind of creative...I mean, if I pull a list of all the people that we&#39;ve worked with, it&#39;s this eclectic resume of work because we&#39;re more than happy to design work for people. The thing is, I love design and a lot of times I feel like&mdash;these days&mdash;the messages are definitely important and key for people, but at the same time, you still have to put out really beautiful things. I don&#39;t want to lose sight of that. We&#39;re designers, you know, we&#39;re artists so let&#39;s make beautiful things. That is what we&#39;re here to do.

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How is this collaboration different from your past ones?

HABANA: Well, this collaboration was all just mine. This is all my work. The only thing that&#39;s actually a collaboration is the latex, which we worked with&nbsp;Vex Clothing on. We&nbsp;worked together to come up with this. Laura&#39;s been great, we approached her and asked if she would do this for us and she was more than happy.

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Is there a memory of or a piece of jewelry that you have from the time that you were growing up? Is that where that started?

HABANA: I&#39;d like to think that when my brother and I used to play Dungeons and Dragons&mdash;so, so long ago in like the early 80s&mdash;when I was like 7 or something. My brother would roll the statistics of each character and then I would actually design the armor that they were wearing. Everything has been metal-based for me and it&#39;s just inherent, I think.

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From Dungeons and Dragons breastplates to Nicki Minaj breastplates?

HABANA: Exactly! It&#39;s all the same...and they&#39;re both fighting, just for different reasons. So, I&#39;m totally down.

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What is the one thing that you feel is lacking among the major jewelry brands? What do you feel like you offer that others in the field don&#39;t?

HABANA: I think what I offer is a range of work and a range of skill. I think my creativity isn&#39;t held back by business or commercialism. I think, for me, what we offer is [an encouragement] to be more of a dreamer. I feel like if you dream a little bit more, you&#39;ll just feel better. I&#39;m just lucky that I&#39;m doing exactly what I want to do and people are responding to it.

Chris Habana: Part Jewelry Designer, Part Mad Scientist

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