BEYOND THE GRILL

Avant-garde fashion finds inspiration in many quarters, but few designers have been willing to tackle, um, dentistry. Enter the retainer necklace by Jules Kim of Bijules NYC, with its single protruding gold tooth — it would never be “accidentally” thrown away with a lunch tray in the junior high cafeteria. Kim created it especially for her roommate, the fashion photographer Brooke Nipar, who had lost a tooth in a bar fight; she cast it in gold and hung it from a detachable chain so that Nipar could pop it in her mouth or wear it around her neck with pride. Meanwhile, the London artist William Hunt has created a limited-edition set of silver cuff links made from casts of the wisdom teeth he had removed as a “performance” in art school. The three Six Six Six girls, whose macabre design line is named Triskaidekaphobia after the fear of the number 13, offer spiky silver bangles and slinky pendants sculptured from metal baby teeth; the San Francisco gothic brand Loved to Death offers actual human baby teeth set in gold, Victorian-inspired settings. And Dominic Jones’s yellow gold shark fangs interspersed with gold rose thorns are just begging for someone to take a nibble.