Jewelry Designers Romance the Stones
Lyla Campbell
If you’re gearing up for the great quake, you might want to pack a piece of carnelian jewelry with your lifesavers. A designer named Lyla Campbell calls it “the ultimate California stone,” because it protects a wearer from the paths of falling buildings. Or so they believed in King Tut’s time.
All of Campbell’s designs in her Gem Power line are made of stones that she has plucked from ancient legends. She uses lapis lazuli because the Egyptians believed that it inspired wisdom; turquoise because American Indians said that it had protective powers, and tiger’s eye because it was supposed to improve a person’s ability to perceive.
Campbell is a rehabilitation psychologist who says that she made her first necklaces as self-therapy. Now she travels to the ancient corners of the Earth--Peru, Thailand, Indonesia--collecting folklore along with materials for her commercial line, which is available at Neiman-Marcus.
“Legends lead to understanding cultures,” she says. “They make use of symbols and beliefs that continue on, inside all of us. Those symbols and beliefs are what bind humanity together.”
The language of semiprecious stones tells Campbell which gems to choose. Every stone affects her mood.
“I respond best to the soothing, calming types,” she says, naming coral and turquoise as her favorites.
The gems that she likes least are pearls. “They protect you from the perils of the sea,” she explains.
“I’m more concerned about earthquakes.”
Duane FitzGerald
Pearls don’t appeal much to Duane FitzGerald either. Her earrings, bracelets and necklaces are made of boldly scaled leather. She says that they aren’t too large for small women to wear. But they are too much for some other types.
“Conservative women who wear little pearl earrings turn out to be reluctant about wearing my designs,” she finds.
FitzGerald’s leather works, made under her Leather Butterfly label, are ruffled, wrinkled, roughed-up, spray-painted. She wraps the leather around big balls or flat disks or stitches it into leaf shapes. She says that she considered adding fake gemstones to some of her styles, but she’s convinced that the days of glass and glitz are numbered.
Instead, she’s blending pink snakeskin with strips of sterling silver for spring. And she’s designing her first bracelets for men, because so many men are buying her solid-color snakeskin cuffs for themselves.
“My men customers surprise me,” FitzGerald says. “They look like the most ordinary people in the world. They come into a store wearing a normal sweater and a pair of slacks. When one man in his 40s told me that he loved a tan snakeskin cuff of mine, I thought he meant that he wanted to buy it for a woman. But he bought it for himself.”
FitzGerald presented her new collection recently at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills.
Kathryn Post
Despite FitzGerald’s predictions, there are plenty of women who aren’t convinced that the big-glass look is a goner. Especially if it looks disarmingly real.
Kathryn Post, who admits that her jewelry designs are inspired by Harry Winston, Van Cleef and Arpels, Tiffany and the like, is showing a collection of floral bracelets, Czarist Russia rings and chandelier drop earrings for spring.
She gives them pet names that use the initials of their upper-crust origins: “H. W. Bigs” for a pair of Winstonian drop earrings. “H. W. Clusters” for clip-on rhinestone and synthetic-sapphire earrings. “the T.F.” for a rhinestone-and-synthetic-ruby ring.
Post also styles bolder, modern-shaped pieces such as a sterling-silver cuff with a pink headlight stone. But, she finds, “Dollar for dollar, the jewelry that looks like the expensive, real stuff is what sells. The more traditional designs will outsell the newer, bold-and-clean-looking things.”
Post keeps her fingers in both jewelry boxes, working with synthetic stones as often as she works with the real thing. Her earliest designs were made of unusual pearls. She still likes to use uncommon, semiprecious stones, such as citrine and a rare green garnet from Kenya.
For all the big and bold of jewelry designs right now, Post says that she sees a smaller scale coming. “When that happens I’ll go back to making small, real jewelry,” she says.
“People don’t want small fakes, because they can afford small real.”
Post recently presented her latest styles at I. Magnin. Her designs are regularly offered in the Horchow catalogue as well.
Jean Mahie
Jean Mahie, a sculptor who designs 22-karat gold pendants, bracelets and rings, says that she makes jewelry because she doesn’t like it.
What she does like is carrying her sculpture with her wherever she goes. And she says her jewelry designs are versions of her sculptural works.
Everything in Mahie’s collection is one of a kind and handmade. Most of the world’s finest jewelry is made of 18-karat gold because it is believed to be stronger than pure, 24-karat gold. Despite that, Mahie uses 22-karat gold because of its tactile qualities.
“Pure gold is never cold when you touch it,” she says. “It’s so soft it absorbs your body heat.”
Her styles are only available at Neiman-Marcus. And Mahie says that her collectors wait for her to come West from a New York studio to help them choose their next purchase.
“That’s because I never lie to them,” she says. “I tell them what looks good on them and what looks bad.”
She says that she once talked a man out of buying a small pendant for his wife. And she told him why: “The woman is large with a strong jaw, and if he gave her a small pendant it would look as if she was wearing something she got when she was a teen-ager.”
