ICE ON ICE -- HOW VERY NICE
It’s our pick for the strangest Hollywood invitation ever: Join jet-setting jewelry designer Jade Jagger in the garden of the Chateau Marmont with 90 of her closest friends to celebrate the debut of a $250,000 white gold ice-chipping implement encrusted with diamonds, lapis lazuli and moonstone dubbed the “Jagger Dagger.”
Yup, you read that right: a cadre of the town’s bold-faced names, including Paris and Nicky Hilton, Rachel Zoe, Kimberly Stewart and billionaire investor Ron Burkle, basically showed up to a coming-out party for a quarter-million-dollar ice pick.
Jagger, the designing offspring of Rolling Stone Mick and club-hopping model Bianca, imprinted the evening with her own sense of style. The menu and jewel-themed place settings were scrawled in lipstick on gilt-framed mirrors (Jagger, the sisters Hilton and Burkle were appropriately at the Jade table). And a London graffiti artist who calls himself Inkie was flown in for the evening to toil away on a 12-foot-by-10-foot mural.
The dagger itself is a study in excess: an 18-carat white-gold hilt studded with 12 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds, 42 sapphires, a lapis lazuli bead and a carbon steel blade. A “cheaper” version, with just 12 carats of white topaz and 42 pieces of aquamarine, costs $10,000. (Both are available at Harrods in London, should you find yourself with more money than common sense.) It was unveiled, as such things are wont to be, via a Jermaine Browne-choreographed ritual dance that culminated in four dancers clad in gray silk shirt dresses by Jagger’s Jezebel line, each taking half-hearted stabs at an ice block the size of a refrigerator.
Belvedere Vodka bankrolled the bash -- and tapped Jagger to design the pricey pick as part of a luxury branding effort. According to Belevedere’s international marketing manager, Chloe Lloyd-Jones, anyone ordering a magnum of Belvedere at a handful of nightspots (including 1 Oak in New York and VIP in Paris) will be treated to a similar tableside experience. “Four people will come to the table,” she said. “Two carrying a block of ice, one carrying the dagger and one carrying the magnum.” Lloyd-Jones pointed out that larger chunks of hand-chiseled ice melt slower, thusly improving the flavor of the drink.
“There is finesse in everything,” Jagger explained earnestly before dinner. “Just like you can realize there is good salt and there is bad salt, there is amazing ice, and there is run-of-the-mill ice. So if you hand-carve good ice with a diamond-encrusted dagger, let me tell you, your drink tastes better.”
Maybe so, but the real flavor of the evening came with the post-dessert free-for-all assault on the towering blocks of frozen water. Jagger, who wore a red velvet, jewel-trimmed hoodie for the ice-chipping after-party, urged her celebrity friends to take a stab at it.
“It breaks away a lot easier than you think,” mused Donovan Leitch, blade in hand. “I think I’m going to do this every day.”
Rod Stewart’s daughter Kimberly bent a blade chipping her initials into the block. “It’s a nice release,” she said, stepping aside as Bai Ling mounted a final attack. “It brings out the mischievous side of you,” she said afterward.
And whether it ends up moving many magnums of vodka, the spectacle has done more for the image of the ice pick than a hundred “Basic Instinct” sequels ever could.
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