Illusions : Designer Fakes Brighten Wardrobe
Kenneth Jay Lane would like to see women of wealth give their money to charity “and wear junk jewelry” instead of investing their funds in rocks.
Lane’s motives, of course, are not entirely altruistic. For the last 25 years his costume jewelry has dangled from all the right necks and earlobes, including those of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. (The most important piece he made for Onassis, he says, was a copy of a Van Cleef & Arpels ruby, emerald and sapphire necklace with pendant, given to her by her late shipping-magnate husband.)
Fakes aren’t merely a matter of pride for the New York designer. He truly pities the woman whose jewelry wardrobe consists merely of the real stuff.
“If a woman has a wonderful collection of real jewelry, then let’s say she has six pairs of good earrings. That means she’s stuck wearing six pairs of earrings for the rest of her life,” the designer laments.
“I think women want more change that that. Even those women with the emeralds, the sapphires, the rubies or the pearls might like to wear pinks and yellows for a change,” he says.
Lane believes that the biggest mistakes women make with their jewelry is not having fun with it (“one strand of eight millimeter real cultured pearls are not much fun”), and wearing jewelry, like tiny stud earrings, “that does nothing for them.”
In his Saville Row suit, striped shirt and Kenneth Jay Lane imitation of a Cartier Tank watch, the designer is the picture of sophistication, ever witty and amusing.
He drops names.
“Betsey,” he says, meaning Betsey Bloomingdale, “likes amusing earrings. She’s gotten a bit trendier than she was years ago and it suits her.”
He tells stories.
“I said, ‘Raquel, why do you want to wear jewelry? You have your own jewels!’ ”
He shocks.
To illustrate why women should wear earrings to distract from imperfections in their faces, he recounts: “Kitty Miller, who died a few years ago and was always on the best-dressed lists, did not have the perfect face. And she never went out without diamond earrings, very jazzy diamond earrings because you didn’t notice the mole on the side of her nose. You just looked at the earrings and the effect of Kitty Miller was attractive.”
Lane also tells stories on himself.
He says he once bought himself a pair of real gold cuff links from designer David Webb, the source of many of his inspirations, because “I felt David had paid for my cuff links many times over.”
With shops in London and Paris since 1967, Lane only recently has set out to expand his horizons with boutiques around the country, his recently opened boutique at Bullocks Wilshire being the latest jewel in the Lane crown. There is also a small store--127 square feet (“like a jewel box”)--in New York’s Trump Tower modeled “as a joke” after Harry Winston’s Fifth Avenue shop.
“Donald Trump took me through and I decided to open in five minutes,” he recalls.
This month, another store opens on Columbus Avenue and yet another will open next spring on Madison Avenue.
For now, Lane’s mood for jewelry is very 18th Century. Lane calls his newest line the “let-them-eat-cake collection,” and it’s filled with intricately made necklaces and earrings that are laden with diamonds.
“And I use the word diamonds loosely,” Lane adds.
