Modern Jewelry Trends

A look at the party pictures from Oscar night confirms what we saw on the red carpet. When it comes to jewelry, the new Hollywood uniform is an armful of bangles and cuffs and a bare neck, worn with a strapless or one-shoulder dress, usually embellished with beading or other ornamentation. The only individuality is on the ear, where there’s still a lot of variety: studs and clusters are becoming much stronger but chandeliers still have fans, especially actresses who like to wear their tresses long. Hoops and linear earrings also work well. So how does something like this happen? Do all the stylists wake up one day and decide it’s all about the wrist? (Modern Jeweler did do a fashion feature on the cuff last fall.) This wrist focus could be the most important jewelry style legacy of the Oscars. The balance and proportions seem to have shifted.

A trend toward bejeweled and ornamented dresses made this a less than stellar year for fine jewelry at the Oscars. The main jewelry trend was for large diamond cuffs and stacked diamond bangles. Dresses were often strapless, which made the lack of necklaces even more striking. One prominent necklace, the Cartier brooch worn as a pendant by Rachel Weisz, clashed with her ornamented dress, drawing criticism from the “style experts” assessing red carpet looks (although not as much as the strange short golden jacket sported by Jennifer Hudson that she wisely took off before the ceremony). Neutral, bronze, and blush gowns dominated. The trend for rose cut diamonds and blackened metal seen at the Golden Globes continued. Gwyneth Paltrow had one of the most successful looks, with Fred Leighton rose-cut chandelier earrings visible with her sleek hair wrapped over one shoulder. Many pieces, like the black and white diamond Lorraine Schwartz earrings worn by Cate Blanchett and the diamond drops worn by Jessica Biel, featured blackened gold or platinum that added to the vintage appeal. Style icon Nicole Kidman, also with her hair over one shoulder, had the most stunning jewelry of the night: wide cuff bracelets with 357 carats of natural rough maccle diamonds in a mosaic pattern that were designed by L’wren Scott and created by William Goldberg, part of the sightholder Leo Schachter group. The bracelets were beautiful and also completely on trend.

The Tuesday edition of Women’s Wear Daily had a fascinating report on the rising prices for luxe handbags. Prices have basically doubled in the past few years and designer handbags at the top of the range are now five and six figures. “It’s astonishing how high a price point we’ve been able to sell and not a few but a lot of handbags at these prices,” Terry Lundgren, president and CEO of Federated told WWD. The luxury customer buys several thousand-dollar bags each season. Rather than one “it” bag each season, customers are now looking for something that no one else has, like say the $148,000 limited edition Hermes Birkin bag with pave diamond clasp that is waitlisted at the New York store. Exotic skins are increasing the cost and perceived value of bags. “We have customers in Chicago and Boston and some of these areas who alone will purchase $200,000 worth of our product in a year,” said David Lamer of Lambertson Truex, a handbag brand that is opening retail stores which will offer custom bags starting at $3,000. So why am I talking about handbags on a jewelry site? I am sure you can see where I am going with this: men do not buy handbags. Women do. (And they sometimes pay in cash so their significant other won’t know how much they spent on that handbag, according to a recent article in the New York Times.) The self-purchase customer is able to buy very expensive accessories if she finds them desirable. She will buy them again next season. She will buy a whole wardrobe of them. And for this customer, materials cost and price matters less than design, workmanship, and exclusivity. The phenomenon of the $8,000 handbag is a relatively recent one. The designer handbag brands have done a great job promoting their products and making them desirable but the marketing campaigns are less important individually than the impact of the category combined as a whole. (Lambertson Truex isn’t Hermes, after all.) Jewelers who do a great job attracting this customer with desirable, fashionable jewelry designs will be astonished at her determination to have the latest must-have item.

At last night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, there were no va-va-voom red dresses or major bling: the trend was instead for tasteful and fashionable understatement. Two trends characterized the best dressed actresses. 1) Neutral colored dresses in taupe, cream, bronze, and grey and 2) the jewelry equivalent: old-mine and rose cut diamonds, which provide more sophisticated glamour. Cate Blanchett epitomized this trend in an Indian pendant necklace featuring more than 100 carats of rose-cut diamonds, along with a pair of 2 carat antique mine cut Diamond stud earrings by Fred Leighton. (Remember Angelina Jolie also wore rose-cut diamonds and a vintage Indian look from Bochic at the Golden Globes.) Other antique fanciers: Edie Falco in a 19th Century necklace and earrings, also from Fred Leighton; Felicity Huffman in rose cut earrings from Martin Katz; and Patricia Arquette in an 1820s diamond riviere necklace from Neil Lane. One good omen for the Oscars: updos dominated, as at the Golden Globes, the better to see those diamond earrings!

Blood Diamond, which hasn’t done very well at the box office so far, may have a second chance: today it was nominated for five Oscars, including two top acting awards. Leonardo DiCaprio, who was widely expected to be nominated for The Departed, was nominated instead for Blood Diamond. Djimon Hounsou was nominated for best supporting actor. The other two awards were for film editing, sound mixing, and sound editing.

With award season upon us, the battle for celebrity red-carpet placements is in full swing. At the Golden Globes, the big winner was Lorraine Schwartz, whose innovative designs were worn by Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, Cate Blanchett, Jessica Biel, Sheryl Crow, Emily Blunt, Sarah Paulson, Isla Fisher, and Sean Combs. Although other jewelers may have had as many placements, Lorraine Schwartz designs stand out in a crowd, with their distinctive and unusual style (as well as highly visible scale!) FabSugar blog has great details and images of all the pieces. The classic large diamonds loaned by most other jewelers often aren’t really distinguishable from each other. There were a few exceptions. Angelina Jolie wore a distinctive Indian-style suite in 22k set with rose-cut diamonds by Bochic. (We have a picture of the necklace below, as well as yesterday’s post of Jolie wearing it.) Heidi Klum always does a good job showing off her collection for Mouawad and last night was no exception, with a very visible $1 million choker with a heart-shaped diamond locket. Hilary Swank wore a large Chopard flower in brown and white diamonds in her hair, which had great impact on the red carpet. But Chopard also gets a lot of press for paying celebrities, including Swank, to wear their pieces. (A Chopard spokesperson in a story on the topic in the Los Angeles Times: “Saying one brand pays stars when they all pay stars is ridiculous.’”) So some of the good publicity for the brand is undercut somewhat. The New York Post dishes on this topic in a recent story called Carpetbaggers. At least those that contract to wear the jewels are guaranteed to credit the company (and pull back the hair so those earrings show.) I am sure Leviev is a bit upset that Drew Barrymore could not pronounce the company name when showing off her Leviev earrings at the Golden Globes.

Every award season includes stories on placements and the business of the red carpet. But the Diamond Information Center, which actively promotes diamonds before the Golden Globes with a luncheon organized with InStyle, is rising above the fray this year (and helping to offset any Blood Diamond-inspired red carpet remarks like those by Djimon Hounsou at the Globes) by offering nominees or presenters at the Golden Globes, Grammys, or Academy Awards who wear a diamond right-hand ring a $10,000 donation in their name to a cause or project in Southern Africa. Raise Your Right Hand Ring for Africa is sponsored by red-carpet regular jewelers, including H. Stern, Martin Katz, and Neil Lane. DIC hopes to raise $100,000 for these causes this year and is well on the way already.

Dramatic jewelry lit up the red carpet at the Golden Globes last night and the most successful looks were truly golden. After years of diamond-intensive bling, this year’s best jewelry styles showed texture and unusual gold work (in addition to diamonds, of course). The trend was best captured by the suites worn by Angelina Jolie, Beyonce, and Jennifer Lopez. Angelina Jolie wore an unusual vintage Indian-style suite by Bochic in 22k gold set with rose-cut diamonds. Beyonce wore fancy colored diamonds in unusual shades surrounded by gold, all by designer Lorraine Schwartz: a natural multi-colored diamond and old ivory bangle; earrings with 40 carats of diamonds in unusual colors; and a grey, yellow and white diamond right hand ring. Jennifer Lopez chose gold and black gold chandelier earrings, coil bracelets and rings by Lorraine Schwartz.

Today two New York press conferences addressed the issues behind the movie Blood Diamond. In one way, they couldn’t have been more different. The first, held in the Open Society Institute, was organized by Global Witness and Amnesty International. It addressed flaws in the Kimberley Process and the atrocities that took place in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s and the conflict going on today in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They asked for government oversight and auditing of every diamond purchase. Filmmaker Sorious Samura showed ninety seconds of his upcoming documentary on conflict diamonds where he easily sells rough diamonds with no paperwork to sleazy guys on 47th Street in New York. A scattering of television cameras and a few consumer journalists puzzled through talk of the Kimberley Process, with one T.V. cameraman worried that the footage was not sufficiently dramatic asking in frustration: “Could you tell us about the suffering that diamonds cause?”
The second press conference two hours and two blocks away in the glossy Mandarin Oriental of Time Warner Center was packed with journalists and cameramen from the realms of music, fashion, culture, and, of course, jewelry. Russell Simmons, with a wall of slogans behind him a la Bush, spoke about his fact-finding trip to Southern Africa and the benefits that diamonds have on the economy of Botswana and South Africa. He stressed the fact that 85 percent of the revenue from Botswana’s diamonds went to the people of Botswana and discussed his new Diamond Empowerment Fund. The managing director of Debswana, Botswana’s mining company, spoke about the benefits diamonds bring to the economy. The first question came from a gossip columnist from the New York Post, asking Simmons where his wife was and whether or not they were still married.
Although these press conferences came from two perspectives on the issue, they had one thing in common. They demonstrated why a complex issue is not best discussed through the prism of celebrity and celebrity culture.
This pot has been well stirred by the media circus surrounding Blood Diamonds, of course. Neither of these press conferences would have happened without the news hook of the movie. But it was pretty clear from the questions that no one in the consumer media really knows or cares much about these issues and that all the media attention about conflict diamonds isn’t generating much understanding.
So how will consumers react to all the noise? Those who care will probably follow Leonardo DiCaprio’s advice to ask retailers to show them their policy showing that they don’t carry conflict diamonds. Then promptly forget about it.

Today’s best Blood Diamond article comes from New York magazine: the movie review, They Cut Glass. And Hands. The article leads off with what’s become the bottom line for us all: will it actually change consumer behavior? And, dear me, what will the celebrities do at awards time? Wear paste? Read it and weep:
“It will be fun to see which stars are willful and/or clueless enough to wear diamonds to this year’s Academy Awards if the political action melodrama Blood Diamond—about the carnage surrounding the mining of the gemstones in Sierra Leone—racks up a lot of nominations. Forgive me for opening on such a superficial note, but the truest measure of the worth of the movie—which is both excitingly well made and dispiritingly formulaic—will be in what trickles down: whether strong box office plus Leonardo DiCaprio’s earnest proclamations on Oprah plus the opportunistic shame of Hollywood goddesses can disrupt Tad and Suzy’s engagement-ring expedition and Dad’s anniversary surprise for Mom.”
And honestly, once the movie buzz dies down, what will the jewelry blogs write about? Who is thinking about our needs?

This morning, the Today show took a look at a diamond’s journey from mine to market, tracing the pipeline from Jwaneng mine in Botswana (probably footage left over from Matt Lauer’s visit there a few years ago) to sorting at the DTC in London to cutting on 47th Street in New York. Although conflict diamonds are mentioned, they are mentioned in context. The piece says that diamonds should “bear a certificate that shows where they come from.” Neither the upcoming movie or the Kimberly process are mentioned. The obligatory happy couple is thrilled that their diamond takes a year to move from mine to market and is touched by so many people. A story on Blood Diamond this morning in Newsday newspaper in New York? Less positive: “The memory may be a decade old, but the hunk of glistening carbon on your finger reminds you, whenever it catches your eye, of that giddy little scene: the velvet box, the few portentous words. Would it taint the romance of the stone to think that a slave under the eye of an 11-year-old armed with an AK-47 might have scooped it out of the fetid black mud of Western Africa? That he might have handed it to overseers who exerted their control by hacking off miners’ limbs with machetes? Or that a smuggler might have slipped it into a condom and then swallowed it, only to be disemboweled by a rebel soldier determined to retrieve it?” Charming. Expect more of this each day, as we count down to the opening of Blood Diamond on December 8. One interesting event scheduled is a press conference on December 5 with Russell Simmons and Kimora Lee Simmons, co-owners of Simmons Jewelry Company (and not-so-happy couple) who will have just returned from a nine-day journey to South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique. Simmons will announce “major historic initiatives pertaining to Africa and the diamond industry by the Simmons Jewelry Company.”