Evgeny Glagolev & Timur Ibragimov

Our pieces should say more about us than we can say about ourselves.

Before the jewelry #

Two backstories, both unconventional, both pointed toward the same place.

Evgeny Glagolev grew up in Russia with a grandmother who was a geologist — a woman whose professional life was organized around the classification and evaluation of stones. The particular knowledge that builds through childhood proximity to that kind of expertise — the ability to read a mineral, to understand what makes one stone different from another at a level below market language — would eventually become Ninotchka’s founding competitive advantage.

Timur Ibragimov grew up in Dagestan and moved progressively through Russia: to St. Petersburg, then to Moscow, working across journalism and television, accumulating the kind of urban cultural exposure that clarifies what one actually cares about beneath the surface of one’s career. He wrote fairy tales from adolescence — not as a literary project but as a practice, a way of working through images and narratives that had no obvious professional destination.

Both arrived at J&W Russia, Russia’s jewelry trade publication, though not simultaneously. Glagolev joined in 2008 and spent three years building the industry knowledge — stone grades, market structures, craft traditions, the geography of global jewelry production — that formal credentials had never provided him. Ibragimov joined the staff in 2011, just as Glagolev was departing for a culture editor role at Vogue Russia. Their overlap was brief. The informal collaboration it sparked was not.

The Paris crossroads #

The conventional route to haute joaillerie for someone without family connections to the trade is institutional: apprenticeship at an established maison, years of learning one’s assigned fragment of the craft, eventual elevation through a hierarchy that takes decades to climb. Timur went to Paris expecting to enter that route. The Place Vendôme expert he consulted told him plainly that it was not the right path — that what he should do instead was nurture and develop his own style.

This was not encouragement. It was redirection with the door closed behind it.

What Timur did with that closed door defines everything about what Ninotchka became. He stayed in Paris and taught himself. Private lessons from masters who operated outside the institutional system. Days in the Musée d’Orsay absorbing decorative arts history. Antique shops along the Seine where he began acquiring the understanding of untreated historical stones that would become the practice’s defining methodology. And still the fairy tales — which were becoming, he would later describe, unexpected blueprints for jewelry pieces.

The founding and the silence #

There is a particular detail about Evgeny Glagolev’s professional life that illuminates the kind of person who builds Ninotchka alongside founding it. He simultaneously holds the position of PR director at Gokhran — the State Depository for Precious Metals and Gemstones, equivalent to a national treasury for stones. By day, he manages communications for an institution that holds some of the most significant mineral wealth in Russia. By evening, or in the hours between, he makes jewelry. The same man who writes press releases for a state depository sources antique gemstones from the world’s private dealers and sets them in Damascus steel. The Gokhran position, documented in the Katerina Perez interview, may also represent something practical: access to domestic stone networks in a period when international sourcing has been severed.

Evgeny and Timur formally established Ninotchka in Moscow in 2014. The name came from Renata Litvinova — Russian film star, BoF 500 member, their first client and long-running ambassador — who suggested it from the 1939 Ernst Lubitsch film starring Greta Garbo. They chose not to explain the name publicly. They chose not to announce the founding at all.

For four years, they accepted commissions only through private referral, built no website, sought no press coverage, and declined all requests for interviews. The logic was absolute: if the work was genuinely exceptional, it would find its audience. If it was not, no amount of exposure would compensate. They were doing the work and letting it circulate through the private channels — collectors, patrons, the community of people who care about jewelry at the highest level — without any of the conventional acceleration mechanisms.

When former J&W colleague Elena Veselaya shared a photograph of ivy earrings set with Colombian emeralds on Instagram in 2017, it was the first time Ninotchka’s work had appeared in any public forum. They had not posted it themselves.

What the silence proved #

In 2018, Vivienne Becker — the British jewelry historian who has spent her career documenting and curating the world’s most important independent jewelry — sought out Ninotchka and invited them to the inaugural Contemporary Designer Showcase at GemGenève. The selection was not based on a press kit or a portfolio submission. It was based on the work reaching her through the channels that authentic quality reaches the people who understand it.

Becker placed them alongside Emmanuel Tarpin, who was already becoming recognized as one of the most significant new voices in contemporary jewelry. She cited their “strong, individualist point of view, well-defined style and sophistication of craftsmanship.”

The following year, Ninotchka returned to GemGenève. A Russian nephrite and Siberian amethyst ring became the most photographed object at the fair.

In 2020, Evgeny and Timur gave their first substantial interview, to Katerina Perez, explaining that they had never talked about themselves before because “our own freedom, privacy and independence were important to us.” They had “decided that the time has come for us to speak.”

The silence had lasted six years. It had proven the point they needed to prove: that in haute joaillerie, the rarest thing is not the stones but the judgment — and judgment cannot be manufactured through announcement.

Last updated: April 23, 2026