Aiyana Dieselle Jaffe has been creating pieces of jewelry a few inches big, while Robert William O’Connell has spent years designing residential interiors.
“I’m so micro,” she said, “and he’s so macro.”
They each graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, she in illustration, he in industrial design.
“He was there, then he wasn’t there,” said Jaffe, who had seen O’Connell around campus and thought he was cute before he took a semester off. During that time, he worked with Leon Ransmeier, an industrial designer in Manhattan, and had a solo show, Standing Objects, at Galerie James in Paris.
O’Connell, 32, is a design director at Martin Brûlé Studio, an interior architecture and design services firm with several locations.
Jaffe, 31, is a product development manager at Laura Lombardi, a fashion jewelry brand in Manhattan, and the designer and owner of Aiyana Dieselle Jaffe, a custom fine jewelry brand.
In March 2016, she danced right up to him around midnight at his welcome back party in the old, rundown off-campus house he shared with eight housemates in Providence.
“I’m Rob,” he said. “I’m Aiyana,” she said.
Without another word, they danced for about an hour to groups like Talking Heads and New Order.
They drank Narragansett beer and exchanged Instagram handles before a good night kiss.
“I felt a spark or a click,” he said.
That Friday, they ran into each other at RISD beach, a grassy student hangout, and decided to meet the next day at Dave’s Coffee downtown.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
He had an espresso, and she iced coffee, as they walked along the Providence canal and then visited each other’s campus design studios.
At his studio, he unrolled some sketches on a big paper roll of sculptural furniture in an open-plan office space.
“His work is very intentional, thoughtful and serious,” Jaffe said.
Then, at her studio, he enjoyed her push toys like wooden dogs with bobbing heads and playful pillows with arms and hands, but was truly dazzled later by a silver earring in progress at her jewelry bench in another building.
“With a playful hinge,” he said, “so delicately constructed,” like Josef Hoffmann’s 1920s silver work. “It felt like a real world work.”
As they hung out regularly, their friend groups mingled more. They went bowling on her birthday in April and gallery hopping on campus on Thursday gallery nights.
After graduating in December, O’Connell worked at Rafael de Cárdenas for a decade and lived with his parents in Metuchen, N.J., where he grew up, until 2019. He visited Jaffe in Providence at least every other weekend.
She then moved back home to Bridgehampton, N.Y., where she grew up, after she graduated in spring 2017 and became an assistant to Keith Sonnier, a pioneer in neon art. They saw each other at least every other weekend, usually taking in museums or galleries in New York.
“It was wash, rinse, repeat,” she said, and in 2019, they moved into an eight-foot-wide railroad apartment in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
When Covid hit, they committed to a plant-based diet, played backgammon and took long walks. In August 2022, after their landlord sold their building, they moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn.
“I never really worried if or when we’d get married,” she said.
In December 2024, she couldn’t be more surprised when he proposed with a 1957 Maria Pergay silver box with a decorative buckle. Jaffe had pointed it out and playfully said, “That one’s mine,” two months earlier at an opening of the French designer’s work at Demisch Danant gallery in Manhattan. (O’Connell had already placed a hold on it).
At home, after enjoying specialty tofu at the now-closed EN Japanese Brasserie, she did a double take when she saw that very silver box next to flowers on the aluminum and glass coffee table that the couple had designed together.
“I asked her to open the box, she gasped,” said O’Connell, who had made its silk velvet ivory lining, and read the enclosed note aloud, before getting on one knee.
He then, wisely, handed her another note: “Coupon for one engagement ring (nontransferable).”
“It couldn’t be more perfect,” she said. “He knew he couldn’t buy a ring for me.”
She created a ring with two one-carat cushion-cut, colorless diamonds on a white gold band. She also designed their wedding rings.
On June 5, Deborah Bowman, a marriage officiant in the Office of the City Clerk, officiated before the couple’s parents at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. Later, they celebrated with 65 guests, taking over abcV, a plant-based restaurant near Manhattan’s Flatiron district.
“I just wanted to have the most fun dinner party ever,” said Jaffe, who wore a Cecilie Bahnsen dress and then changed into one by Pauline Dujancourt.
The groom wore a black wool suit from Séfr with a vintage Issey Miyake shirt and a custom fossilized coral brooch.
Guests sketched, doodled or wrote notes for the newlyweds on pink paper with black crayons left at each table.
“The evening creatively flowed without structure, like a gallery opening,” said O’Connell, who, like his father, is taking the bride’s name.
