Her Tiaras Help Reveal Your Inner Princess
Looking at jewelry designer Cynthia Bach, who is perched in black sweatpants and a well-worn white T-shirt on her 18th century Napoleonic throne, understatement and overstatement become one. Her studio is absolutely unremarkable--an unglitzy Culver City storefront. But inside the cramped workrooms of Bach and her husband and design partner Jim Matthews, something quite glorious is taking place--the transformation of precious metal and stone into enchanting and (often) exceedingly expensive jewelry.
Bach, an American who was raised in a military family in Europe, is smitten with symbols of royalty: crowns, scepters and tiaras, which she incorporates into her designs. “I make everyone a princess,” she says. “That’s my motto.”
And her customers include America’s own bluebloods: the actresses whose baubles launch a thousand trends. Salma Hayek borrowed a $30,000 crown-shaped platinum and diamond bracelet to wear to a recent White House correspondents’ dinner . . . and wore it as a tiara to dramatic and well-publicized effect.
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With a flurry of mentions in such magazines as InStyle, W and Women’s Wear Daily (and a host of other top fashion magazines), Bach, in her early 40s, has caught the eye of Hollywood stylists and an ever-growing number of their young, beautiful clients. These are the waifs who can’t quite pull off the massive jewels of, say, Harry Winston but who want “something more distinctive, more delicate, yet with just as much of a style statement,” says InStyle contributing editor Penny Proddow. “We think Cynthia’s work is rare and wonderful, that’s why we feature it so much.”
The publicity has paid off.
Besides Hayek, Bach’s clients include Cate Blanchett, Hilary Swank, Jennifer Aniston and Maria Shriver, whose husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bought a trio of Bach’s crosses for her.
Men seem to fancy her moody, baroquish and gilded work for their women: Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Tim Allen, Dylan McDermott and Forest Whitaker have all bought her baubles for their significant others.
“There is so much wattage on these stars that what they wear ends up everywhere,” says Bach. After a big event, such as the Oscars or Golden Globes, the gems a starlet has been loaned (the major pieces are almost always loaned, not bought) will sell immediately, no matter the price. (Her signature crown ring costs $1,500, and she makes a line of stackable textured bands that cost between $400 and $600 each.)
For last year’s Emmys, Aniston’s arms were dripping in Bach’s delicate 24-carat gold bangles. In mock horror, Bach says she was asked to “dim down the glimmer of the gold with brown shoe polish at the request of the stylist. . . . But the gold bracelets did catch on.”
She’s also well-known for her use of briolettes, a cut of stone that resembles the crystal drops of chandeliers, and loaned a diamond necklace to Blanchett for last year’s Golden Globe Awards that weighed 100 carats.
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Bach, who was born in Tokyo to a career U.S. Air Force officer and his German wife, lived in Germany for 13 years and it was “the cathedrals, stained-glass windows, the castles, architecture, paintings, museums, grand gardens and forests that inspired my mind,” she says, while pointing to the scores of art and jewelry history books that line both her working studio and apartment. “This stuff got in my soul and never left.”
After she spent two years apprenticing in Europe and studying metalwork in Munich, Germany, Bach came to the U.S. and graduated from Abilene Christian University in Texas. While in college, she apprenticed with the gem master craftsman who would become her husband, and, in 1981, the pair set up shop in Abilene.
A 1989 headhunter’s call altered their lives: Van Cleef & Arpels hired them to make jewelry in the company’s Beverly Hills store. In 1991, the firm closed its West Coast manufacturing operation. Within three days, Bach was sitting in Dallas with the buyer for Neiman Marcus jewelry with a handful of her signature 18-carat gold crown rings and, voila, a royal match was made.
Most women can only dream about Cynthia Bach’s jewelry box. When she goes out, she simply reaches into her massive safe and pulls out--oh, let’s see, what would look good tonight?--how about a necklace with 400 carats of bright-orange Mexican fire opals? Or, maybe, a necklace of Burmese ruby drops, 900 carats in all?
On this night, she plans to meet friends for dinner. “I think I’ll wear the ruby necklace,” she says casually. How do her friends react when she shows up in such exotic jewels?
“My friends usually groan, ‘So what are you wearing tonight?’ ” she says with a laugh. “One girlfriend sometimes simply says, ‘Ouch.’ ”
