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You know my mom told me when I was a little kid, and she walked me around the streets
of Brooklyn, that when she finished the little walk, she'd have to empty my pockets out,
and they were all filled with colored glass. So I guess even at six years old I was fascinated
by color and sparkle and things that glittered.
I was fascinated by period jewelry.
I didn't know who made it, there weren't a lot of books at the time. There wasn't really marks
and monograms, people didn't really know. I just had a visceral reaction to these jewels.
For instance, this bracelet that's illustrated in this book, from the art deco exhibition
that they had last year at the Louvre in Paris. It was amazing. And I had owned this bracelet
from nineteen eighty-seven, when I first came to California. It was in a small little auction.
They didn't say it was French, they didn't say it was signed or marked... and over the
years I found out that it was made by a lady named Suzanne Belperron, one of these most
avant-garde jewelry makers of the nineteen-twenties and thirties in Paris and... I love that!
I love the history, I love touching it... I love all that.
This is one of the more expensive things I've ever bought. I bought that over twenty years
ago. It came up in an auction and I just thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen,
it was like talking to me, like I couldn't not think about it. You know, knowing it had
precious gems and carved sapphires and diamonds and platinum and was handmade... I didn't
know how I was going to get it, um... but I managed to buy it. And then, you know, interesting
enough, I was in Nantucket last year, and I stopped at the Boston Museum to look at
their jewelry collection, and I found in their archives the original drawings and the original
photographs of the necklace. It was made by a company called Trabert & Hoeffer Mauboussin.
And someone had donated all the sketches for them, which is kind of really cool. You can
see it. It was amazing, so now it had an origin. So my fascination with jewels, you know, go
back a long time. For me the butterfly is like one of the jewels
I really love the best. There are 75 carats of diamonds in this one butterfly. You take
the glamour of it, you take the glitter and the red carpet value and like, for me, it's
like one emotion. It's one emotion. I look at and I go oh my god! I use my historical
jewels for everything. I... for reference, how to make jewels, to inspire me. I use them
for red carpets. I probably, if I didn't have these things, I wouldn't really know
how to make jewelry today. But at the time I never thought I would be making jewelry.
I thought, well how could I make jewelry, when, you know, some of the most beautiful
jewels in the world had already been made? And they were my teachers.
You know, I think you, need to the past to go to the present and you need the present
to go to the future. And so I love these things, they totally inspire me.