Henry Clarke
Unmistakable and yet indefinable, glamour has shaped American jewellery style, and American luxury in general. It’s a particular brand of glamour, bred in the Gilded Age, nurtured by Hollywood, by lights, cameras, stardom, powerful femininity and an all-American freedom of expression. It’s a glamour of magnetic allure that reaches beyond conventional beauty, multi-layered and nuanced, with hints of daring, seduction, illusion, secrets and storytelling. So that when Audrey Hepburn stares longingly into Tiffany’s windows, she’s the embodiment of glamour, not only for her beauty but for the cumulative effect of her effortlessly chic black Givenchy gown, her fabulously faux jewels, worn with careless panache, the hint of late-night New York partying, the loneliness of dawn, and the poignancy of her life and dreams. In fact, ever since I gazed at
the famous Tiffany Diamond in its new setting in those same windows, and then stepped into the fabulously refurbished Tiffany Landmark, I’ve been thinking about glamour as the essence of American jewellery, where it came from and how it’s interpreted today. It was Charles Lewis Tiffany, the house’s founder, who sowed the seeds when he brought the lustre of European royal and aristocratic diamonds to New York’s social elite. By the 1870s, he was embellishing the lives of wealthy tycoons, bankers and industrialists, bringing traditional symbols of success to the self-made social hierarchy of Mrs Astor’s famous ‘400’. As Elizabeth Saltzman, American celebrity stylist, explains, ‘America had society, not royalty, so no pomp and circumstance. America was the land of the free; you could create your own story.’ Americans have embraced the joy of jewels with a wholehearted freedom of expression, freedom from rules and a casual opulence that has remained a hallmark of their jewellery.
In the late 1930s and ’40s, as American design began to free itself from European influence, a fully-fledged,…
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