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LOS
ANGELES — It comes by Brink’s truck and is
hand-delivered by security guards. It is served up on
silver platters and in lighted glass vitrines at chi-chi
cocktail parties. The finest jewelry in the world is in
Hollywood during the weeks leading up to the Golden
Globes and Oscars. Because no matter how valuable a
diamond may be, a photo of a celebrity wearing one on
the red carpet is priceless.
Award
show season is the Super Bowl of celebrity placement.
The world’s biggest jewelry brands (Harry Winston,
Cartier, Chopard, Tiffany & Co., Bulgari, Van Cleef
& Arpels, Fred Leighton, Pomellato) are competing
with Hollywood hometown favorites (Neil Lane, Martin
Katz, Loree Rodkin), brash newcomers (Kimberly McDonald,
Stephen Webster, Solange Azagury-Partridge) and
mass-market players (Kwiat, Le Vian) for the chance to
bejewel Hollywood’s beauties and dazzle armchair
fashion fans watching around the globe.
One
sparkling moment in the celebrity spotlight can be worth
millions in advertising for a jewelry brand. The styles
celebrities choose to wear set trends that trickle all
the way down to the mall’s fast-fashion copycats.
“That
image of a celebrity wearing drop earrings or a dramatic
necklace and all the many ways it is shown and commented
on in the weeks after the awards shows … there is no
way to quantify the value,” says Victoria Gomelsky,
editor of JCK magazine, a trade publication for retail
jewelers. The Tiffany tassel earrings worn by Natalie
Portman at last year’s Academy Awards “had an
enormous repercussion on the market.” Jewelry worn in
the hair is another trend that was sparked by
celebrities wearing brooches and bracelets in their
awards night ‘dos. And Le Vian successfully changed
the perception of brown diamonds by renaming them
“chocolate diamonds” and lending them to Halle Berry
and other celebrities to wear on the red carpet.
For
jewelers doing the lending, having a piece on the red
carpet “ratchets up the sense of mystique about a
brand and creates awareness,” Gomelsky says. The red
carpet has become so central to the industry that some
brands are willing to pay celebrities to wear their
jewelry. For last year’s Academy Awards, Tiffany &
Co. reportedly paid Anne Hathaway $750,000 to wear
Tiffany jewels onstage while she was hosting the event.
And Gwyneth Paltrow was rumored to have picked up a
$500,000 paycheck to wear pieces from Louis Vuitton’s
L’Ame du Voyage fine jewelry collection. (Neither
brand has commented on the specifics, and it’s not in
a business’s best interest to be too public about
paying for exposure, but over the last few years some
labels have acknowledged having “contractual
relationships” with stars.)
Other
jewelers use cocktails and canapes to court the
attention of celebrities, hoping to build relationships
and loyalties that will lead to future sales. Award
season buzzes with parties designed to woo wealthy
shoppers and borrowers alike.
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On a
recent Tuesday night at Culina at the Four Seasons Hotel
in Beverly Hills, for instance, Jacqueline Nerguizian
was plying fashion stylists and style influencers with
Champagne and her own version of a Super Bowl ring — a
4-carat center diamond surrounded by princess-cut
sapphires. Although she has been in the business 20
years in Scottsdale, Ariz., it is the designer’s first
award show season.
“Why is
it that guys are the only ones who can have a Super Bowl
ring?” said the designer, a mother of five, dressed in
a tight black cocktail dress. Valued at $50,000, the
ring hasn’t yet made it to an award show, but it did
make it to the Golden Globes nomination ceremony Dec.
15. “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara wore it and
is now in the process of buying it, the designer
confirmed.
Up on
Sunset Boulevard at Bar Nineteen 12 at the Beverly Hills
Hotel, InStyle magazine and Forevermark, a diamond brand
in the De Beers family, were showcasing sparklers by
up-and-coming jewelry designers. Actress Michelle
Williams breezed through, followed by Jessica Alba. “I
am just hoping for some good placements,” jewelry
designer Kimberly McDonald said looking at her handiwork
— two bangles with nearly 70 carats of irregularly
sized diamonds set inside.
Earlier
in the day, jeweler-to-the-stars Neil Lane’s West
Hollywood store was buzzing with security guards and
fashion stylists. “I’m here to pick up for Julie
Benz,” a young woman said to the representative behind
the counter. “She’s wearing a red dress. We want
earrings and bracelets, but no necklaces.”
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It’s
difficult to pin down exactly when the practice of
lending jewelry for the red carpet started. By the
1930s, Paul Flato, the original jeweler to the stars,
was already lending his designs to the studios for
celebrities to wear in films, so it is likely that they
wore them on special occasions too.
But Harry
Winston has long claimed to have been the first to lend
diamonds to a star to wear to the Academy Awards. It was
1944, and at the request of director David O. Selznick,
a friend of the jeweler, Harry Winston lent a pair of
diamond earrings to actress Jennifer Jones, who won the
lead actress award for the film “The Song of
Bernadette” that year.
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The
earrings aren’t visible in photos, and nobody knows
what happened to them afterward, but the moment has
nonetheless become part of Harry Winston lore. The firm
lends out millions of dollars worth of diamonds every
year, including the $165,000 princess-cut diamond choker
Gwyneth Paltrow wore with a pink Ralph Lauren ball gown
when she won an Oscar for 1998’s “Shakespeare in
Love.” After the ceremony, Paltrow’s father, Bruce.
bought it for her.
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“It’s
a company commitment,” says Frederic de Narp, Harry
Winston’s president and chief executive. “We have a
dedicated team, PR effort and craftsman effort. We pull
from all 22 of our salons around the world so
celebrities can pick and choose the best of the best.”
The red
carpet wasn’t the international luxury fashion
phenomenon that it is today until the 1990s, when
Giorgio Armani saw an opportunity and began dressing
Hollywood for award shows.
Jeweler
Martin Katz didn’t know what he was in for when Sharon
Stone called him in 1992 asking to borrow a pearl
necklace and earrings to wear to the premiere of
“Basic Instinct.”
“I
said, ‘Borrow?’” Katz remembers. “If she breaks
it or loses it, it’s too bad, Martin. And it’s not
as if she was going to wear a sandwich board with my
name on it.” Katz agreed on one condition: that Stone
wear his jewelry while doing magazine publicity for the
film and that his name be in the fashion credits.
That
simple agreement changed Katz’s career and the red
carpet forever. “My phone started ringing off the
hook,” he says. “I had to hire publicists to deal
with the phone calls. Jewelers around the world were
offering me pieces to put on celebs; people were even
giving me scripts to show celebs.” Over the years,
he’s bejeweled a bevy of stars. One of his favorite
looks was from the 1997 Oscars, when Nicole Kidman
paired his Indian-looking diamond earrings with her
Asian-inspired chartreuse John Galliano dress.
Fortunately,
there haven’t been too many calamities along the way.
But one notable accident occurred at the 1998 Oscars,
when Minnie Driver’s ruby bracelet snagged and broke.
“A couple dozen rubies went flying. She was on her
hands and knees with James Cameron, and luckily they
found them all,” Katz remembers.
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Although
he can’t measure the results of each placement in
one-to-one sales, he says the media attention has been
invaluable. Katz went from working on his kitchen table
in a one-bedroom apartment to working in his own salon
on Brighton Way in Beverly Hills.
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The
growth of the Internet has made celebrity endorsements
even more valuable, he says. A single placement lives
for perpetuity on websites and blogs and can reach
billions of people.
But Katz
and other smaller jewelers have found it harder to
compete in recent years because so many jewelers have
started playing the game and some are willing to pay for
red carpet exposure.
“Last
year, I had one of my favorite actresses lined up. And
sadly, one of the houses gave her and her stylist
watches as gifts to wear their jewelry,” he says.
Katz says
some of his competitors have celebrities on their
payrolls as well. “In the last five or six years,
agents have started making deals. … To me, if you know
it’s a paid endorsement, it changes the complexion and
perception,” he says.
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Another
jeweler who has benefited from high-profile exposure is
Neil Lane, who started out in 1989 with a counter at the
Antiquarious antique center on Beverly Boulevard. He met
his first celebrity clients because they wandered in,
often after meetings with their agents at International
Creative Management nearby.
His big
break came with Renee Zellweger, who wore a vintage
black James Galanos gown and Neil Lane Art Deco-era
jewelry to the 2001 Golden Globes, where she won best
actress in a comedy for “Nurse Betty.” He remembers
her coming into the shop with her gown in a garment bag.
Since
then, he’s lent jewels to Charlize Theron, Madonna,
Jennifer Hudson and countless others. His store is full
of jewels that have been worn by celebrities, not that
he advertises them as such. But he can identify the
diamond and platinum wave brooches Eva Longoria wore to
the 2011 Golden Globes and the bracelet he purchased
from Mae West’s estate that was worn by Catherine
Zeta-Jones in the film “Chicago.”
“A lot
of celebrities who were buying my (wedding) rings asked
me to borrow jewelry for the red carpet,” he says.
“Or I loaned them jewelry for the red carpet, and then
they bought my rings. It’s very symbiotic, not a
one-shot deal.”
Lane has
become something of a celebrity himself, as the official
engagement ring maker for ABC’s “The Bachelor” and
“The Bachelorette.” And, in the same way fashion
designers capitalize on the exposure they get from doing
runway shows by spinning off more-affordable secondary
fashion lines, Lane has capitalized on the attention he
has received on the red carpet by launching the Neil
Lane Bridal collection at Kay Jewelers nationwide.
Although
he does not pay celebrities to wear his jewelry, Lane
sees the pay-for-play red carpet deals happening. But no
matter how much money is changing hands, relationships
still have more value in the long run, he says.
“Hollywood
is an amazing vehicle for exposure,” he says. “If I
was still in Brooklyn, I don’t think I would be the
guy I am today.”
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