Grammy-Award winner Kalani Peʻa takes unique maile lei to red carpet

Maui resident Kalani Peʻa took a very special maile lei to the red carpet for the Grammy Awards on Sunday Feb. 2. Its 79 leaves were crafted from silver, dipped in gold and surrounded by a string of purple pearls, shared representatives of Maui Divers Jewelry, which gifted the custom piece — worth about $20,000 — to the singer and songwriter. 

It weighed almost four pounds.

This month, Peʻa won the Grammy for Best Regional Roots Music Album. This is the artist’s fourth Grammy.

Maui Divers Jewelry spoke with Aloha State Daily about how its staff members designed and assembled Peʻa’s red carpet look, which was crafted in Honolulu.

Creating the piece took about two and a half weeks, explained Trisha Takara, the curator and product design manager for Maui Divers Jewerly. First, CAD Designer Baiyu Qu sketched a concept and then used computer-aided design software and 3D printers to model it.

For Qu, designing jewelry started as a childhood dream. She studied product design in college. For her master’s degree, she focused on jewelry. The purple pearls in the lei are meant to symbolize a string of flowers, which can accompany maile in a lei, she said. 

“I feel like jewelry is something that people feel happy about,” Qu said. “They share love by giving jewelry to other people.”

The completed lei was so long it did not fit into the machine used for gold plating so members of the staff dipped it into the solution segment by segment, explained Sheila Cachola, the director of manufacturing for Maui Divers Jewelry.

Originally, the partnership between Maui Divers Jewelry and local singers and songwriters started several years ago.  

“We had an initiative called Artists Celebrating Artists,” said Alek Vutipadadorn, the marketing director for Maui Divers Jewelry. “It was started by our CEO and Creative Director Cole Slater, and this is basically to celebrate the local talent we have here in Hawaii.”

In 2020, the Hawaiian- Portuguese singer and songwriter Kimié Miner was nominated for a Grammy. Peʻa went to support and “so we dressed everybody for the 2020 Grammys,” Vutipadadorn said. 

In 2022, when Peʻa was nominated for a Grammy Award, the singer songwriter chose an outfit that honored King Kalākaua. Maui Divers Jewelry designed custom brooches to go with it.

 “From then, the partnership blossomed,” Vutipadadorn said.

In 2023, Maui Divers Jewelry created a custom crown inspired by King Kalākaua. It is featured on the cover of Peʻa’s newest Grammy-Award winning album, “Kuini.” 

“Kalani kept talking about how maile is a celebration of connection — how it's interwoven together and each maile [leaf] is different,” Vutipadadorn said. “We kind of took that as inspiration for his 2025 Grammy’s piece.”

In terms of custom pieces, representatives of Maui Divers Jewelry added that others pieces are in the works, but none could be talked about at the moment. The brand released a new set of pieces, the Nāʻū Collection, which features the Native Hawaiian gardenia on Feb. 7. 

Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.