Into her crystal baubles

When Tarina Tarantino started her accessories business 10 years ago in her one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, husband Alfonso Campos played the role of publicist, charming New York magazine editors on the telephone using the alter ego of Ramon.

“Ramon was very flamboyant, everybody loved him,” Campos says. “Then, people started coming out to L.A. and wanting to meet Ramon, so he had to be retired to Australia.”

Now, the couple’s company, founded on a love of gobstopper-sized beads and twinkling crystals, is 65 employees strong with a new boutique in the Melrose Heights shopping district, others on the way in New York and Tokyo, and more than 1,000 retail accounts worldwide. Their success is proof that in this age, when everyone -- including Louis Vuitton and DeBeer -- is making fine jewelry, it is still possible to build a business on the faux stuff, most of which sells for less than $300.

With a pink lemonade-colored resin floor, apothecary jars filled with beads, porcelain cameos of the designer for drawer pulls, and crystal flower jewelry blooming from every shelf, the L.A. store feels like a shopper’s Candy Land.

“You’d think it would look like Liberace,” says Tarantino. “But it’s actually an homage to my great-grandmother Matilda Anderson, who collected curiosities. She had little shelves filled with Mason jars of sea glass, buttons, beads and vintage jewelry that I used to play with.”

Anderson’s Holmes Avenue residence was also home to the family’s machine shop, and it was there that Tarantino first had a yearning to work for herself. Making jewelry became a hobby, but after stints as a model and a makeup artist (when she worked at the Beverly Center MAC store, customers bought her homemade hairclips right out of her pink hair) she decided to make it a career.

Butterfly- and bumblebee-shaped “anywhere” clips were her first big hit, landing on Hollywood tresses and dresses in 1998. She followed with a full line of jewelry handmade using carved German Lucite and Swarovski crystals, and it wasn’t long before Fred Segal and other stores came calling.

Then, in 2002, Cameron Diaz wore one of Tarantino’s turquoise carved rose bracelets with her Fred Leighton necklace to the Oscars. The piece still sells briskly, at just $45. And the red carpet exposure was not, Tarantino is proud to point out, paid for. Diaz saw someone wearing the bracelet at a party the night before and bought it off of her wrist.

Later that year, Tarantino collaborated with Sanrio’s Hello Kitty on a collection. The designer has been a fan of the pencil cases and erasers emblazoned with the cute cat since age 6. “I didn’t want to just make jewelry with Hello Kitty on it, because Sanrio already does that. So I said, ‘What if Hello Kitty were as obsessed with me as I am with her?’ ” That resulted in a new character, a Hello Kitty/Tarina Tarantino hybrid named Pink Head, whose feline face and pink flip hairdo is emblazoned on pendants, earrings and belt buckles.

Each season brings new “stories” for Pink Head. For fall, she takes a journey to Russia, dressing up like a Matryoshka and dancing under the stars at St. Basil’s Cathedral. “It has its own cult following,” she says.

In the next few weeks, Tarantino will roll out a second collaborative collection with Mattel’s Barbie. “Barbie has been every designer’s inspiration,” says Tarantino, who searched for a fresh spin by scouring the Mattel archives, looking at artwork and packaging. Pieces are designed around images of Barbie from the last five decades such as the 1950s Princess Barbie with her long lashes and high ponytail and 1980s Rainbow Barbie with flowing blond locks. Tarantino also designed a few pieces that Barbie herself might have worn, such as a choker of gumball-sized pink pearls. “When you wear them, you become a giant Barbie doll.”

Tarantino’s business is still privately owned and self-financed. Though most costume jewelry is now made in Asia, hers is assembled in downtown Los Angeles, using Swarovski crystals from Austria and Lucite beads that are poured, molded and tumbled for a few hours or a few weeks in German factories. The cameo-like Barbie and Hello Kitty stones are silk-screened and lacquered, instead of the cheaper alternative -- sealing a photocopied image under a plastic dome.

Although Tarantino claims to ignore trends, her owl-shaped bead bracelets and crystal-studded daisy pendants are spot on for this summer’s 1970s revival. She produces more than 15 collections a year, between the collaborative lines and her own, which add up to hundreds of pieces. Inspiration comes from a variety of sources, including fairy tales, flea market finds and favorite artists Richard Colman and Camille Rose Garcia.

Tarantino’s next projects are a bridal collection (imagine crystal-studded garters) and a line of handbags. And she’s not ruling out fine jewelry -- or having a third child. She and Campos live in a midcentury house in the Hollywood Hills with daughters Chloe, 4, and Olivia, 2. And no, their kitchen faucet and television are not encrusted in crystals. Even Tarantino has her limits. She says, “I don’t want to live in this 24 hours a day.”

A shop’s new icon

How did Iconology, a tiny new La Brea boutique, join heavy-hitters Neiman Marcus and Ron Herman as the only three retailers in L.A. to score the new Karl Lagerfeld collection for fall?

It had to help that co-owner Michelle Dalton Tyree is a former Women’s Wear Daily editor who left the L.A. bureau just months ago to open up shop with her sister Jackie Dalton, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

The Parisian atelier-style boutique is charming, with pink velvet chairs, black plastic chandeliers designed by Nigel Coates, Baccarat sconces in the dressing rooms and stylish quotes from Diana Vreeland and Coco Chanel on the walls (“A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future”).

“As a retail editor, I knew where the holes were in the market,” said Tyree, who wrote about fashion for the Japan Times before arriving at Women’s Wear Daily in 2004. “There are a lot of places that sell denim and T-shirts and a lot of high-end designer stores like Christian Dior, but not a lot of places that combine the two.”

The boutique stocks jeans by Habitual and Paige, shorts by Johnson and T-shirts by Japanese anime-inspired line Tokidoki (designed by Italian-born artist Simone Legno and owned by the founders of Hard Candy cosmetics). Eveningwear from New York designer Doo Ri and Brazilian label Super Suite Seventy Seven ranges from $250 to $7,000. On the accessories front are hats by London milliner Stephen Jones, including a magnificent black feather headdress for $2,629, Gerard Yosca jewelry, Mystique sandals and Denis Colomb cashmere wraps.

The Lagerfeld Collection arrives mid-July, along with Oscar de la Renta, Zac Posen and Behnaz Sarafpour.

Iconology, 353 S. La Brea, between 3rd and 4th streets, Los Angeles, (323) 965-9666 or www.shopiconology.com.