THOSE MAGIC CRYSTALS
A key piece to this spring’s romantic look may already be in your living room: the low-hanging stars of a sparkling chandelier.
At Viktor & Rolf’s ballroom dance of a runway show, big crystal drops dangled from the necklines of dresses, skittered up the sides of pearly white tights and even formed the heels of shoes. Marc Jacobs showed faceted stone heels too, plus necklaces and headbands made with clear chunky stones. Now the knockoffs are everywhere -- in glass and plastic -- and big crystals are on the way to becoming the season’s defining accessory.
When Los Angeles designer Oren Shepher spotted estate chandelier crystals in a flea market in Paris last year, he had the same idea. Shepher, 28, a former set and costume designer, was wandering around Europe looking for inspiration after closing his Sunset Boulevard shop, O Boutique, two years earlier. And he’d been finding that inspiration in estate sales and junk stores: chandelier crystals, vintage coins, St. Christopher medals, old keys he discovered while trekking through North Wales.
Back in Los Angeles, Shepher began making jewelry with his treasures, mostly for himself and friends. He was surprised by the interest -- “It was a total mistake that I started making jewelry.” He debuted a women’s line (prices run from $60 to $300) last month at Petro Zillia on West 3rd Street.
Shepher’s pieces have a beautiful, ad hoc nature, and they demonstrate how favorite pieces can be assembled from found objects. (Who among us doesn’t have a secret collection of pretty shiny things that we don’t quite know what to do with but can’t bear to throw away?)
Take a teardrop crystal from a defunct chandelier, a gold chain -- its bauble long gone -- forgotten in the recesses of a jewelry box, a length of wire, a pair of pliers. With a few deft maneuvers, you can have a necklace for about the cost of a triple soy latte and assembled in about the time it takes to drink one.
The walls of Shepher’s studio, a West Hollywood house he just moved into, are hung with lengths of chains and plastic bags filled with the baubles and unmoored charms he gets from suppliers or on his travels.
Culling beautiful objets d’art from flea-market chaff might seem problematic, but Shepher says it’s easy when you consider quality -- and history. “I look for a good story,” he says. Chandelier crystals evoke an intricate past, whereas vintage keys signal the rooms they were made for, even if their occupants and addresses remain unknown. “My mother could look at an old French button and see the aesthetic possibilities of jewelry; I take after her.”
And assembling disparate items into a unified whole takes only a sense of balance and symmetry, a determination that things be strategically placed.
Shepher’s inspiration? “I’m thinking Coco Chanel’s little sister,” he says, modeling one of his thickly woven chain-and-crystal necklaces, the outer lengths a mixture of inexpensive gunmetal chain and real pearls. Or, “a woman wearing Galliano and army boots walking through the mud; Lady Macbeth on a trip to a hunting lodge.”
Or any one of us, on an early Sunday morning at the sprawling Rose Bowl flea market, who finds a box of shiny things and wonders what to do with it.
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
*
HOW TO MAKE THE NECKLACE
Adapted from Oren Shepher
Time: 10 minutes
Measurements: A 24-inch necklace
Materials: A 24-inch chain, 24-gauge craft wire, one chandelier crystal
Equipment: Wire cutters, round-nose pliers, flat-nose pliers
1. Shepher lays out a gold chain on a jeweler’s black board. “I’m a gold person,” he says, but any chain 24 inches or longer will work.
2. Using a wire cutter, he snips a 2-inch length of thin gold wire (sterling or any craft wire also works) and carefully threads the wire through the bright octagon that tops the teardrop chandelier crystal, twisting the wire twice to anchor it.
3. With round-nose pliers, he makes a loop with the wire, attaching the gold chain before closing the loop. Shepher dangles the finished necklace in the early spring light streaming through the window. His work is done.
Adaptations: Add a series of charms to the necklace, making wire loops to anchor each of them strategically along the chain. Or use two chains or even three of differing metals and weights, twisting them around each other before stringing them with coins, old singleton earrings and vintage keys.
