Jewelry and Fashion Blogosphere 10/07/07
Jewelry Weblog, CA
Not ready for fall yet? Then this first post on this week’s blogosphere line-up might be helpful.
Stylehive gives you five summer/fall transition looks that you can use for ideas on how to make your own favorite summer looks last a couple more months.
55 Secret Street believes in cellulite creams.
Stiletto Jungle features 5 must-have fall handbags that combine high style with an affordable price tag.
Bag Bliss has fallen head over heels for this season’s latest trend, Zagliani Python Designer Handbags
It’s never too early to shop for gifts, check out what Bag Snob is craving from Vivre!
Beauty Snob is obsessed with gorgeous undone “morning after” made up eyes from Fashion Week!
Coquette says Nude Pumps are the sexiest shoes you can wear this season!
Fashiontribes finds the Top 20 most chic, tasty, racy, fashionable & just plain fun ways to show your support for Breast Cancer research & awareness. Instead of cheap pink plastic or enamel-covered trinkets, think silk scarves, tasty cupcakes, elegant wine, cozy cashmere, and even a sleek Mercedes!
You could buy cookie-cutter stars, or dig Diamond in the Rough earrings like Kristopher.
Papierdoll interviews graduate designer Kim Foley on working with the big names in the industry and launching her own line.
Not every celebrity “it” girl started out with fab taste. Second City Style picks our favorites and shows you how to make your own celebrity style transformation to glam, baby.
We Love Beauty asks, Love It or Leave It
Jewelry and Beading has a zero calorie candy bracelet perfect for Halloween lovers.
October 8th, 2007
Kiess Jewelry makes sizeable donation
Coldwater Daily Reporter, MI
Published: Sunday, October 7, 2007 7:57 PM CDT
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COLDWATER — Every other year the CHC Volunteers partners with Kiess Jewelry to dazzle employees, physicians and volunteers with jewels that they normally might not have time or funds to purchase, but because special priced items are offered at a discount, they can. Kiess then generously donates 25 percent of their total gross sales back to CHC. During the sale this past spring, Kiess Jewelry donated $3,600 to CHC, making them a $10,000 donor since they first started partnering for the sale.
The donation is first given to the CHC Volunteers. Then each year the Volunteers donate a lump sum of their earnings throughout the year from a variety of sales, fundraisers and gift shop purchases back to CHC. This year they were able to donate $30,000, which CHC uses to provide necessary equipment to benefit patients and visitors.
CHC is happy to partner with Kiess Jewelry who has been very active in the community since 1930 and has been a long-time supporter of the hospital.
October 8th, 2007
Jewelry still makes collector’s eyes sparkle
Houston Chronicle, United States
Each piece of Helen Williams Drutt’s collection has a story to tell
By MOLLY GLENTZER
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
Viewing Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry From the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, you might think poor Helen Williams Drutt has to walk around unadorned these days.
Not so.
Drutt, whose collection was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2002, visited the museum recently wearing loads of bold, wearable art — including a new wedding ring.
“I’m 76 and a bride,” she said, beaming. Jet-black hair peeked from under her well-worn Panama hat, and her eyes sparkled through massive Jean Paul Gaultier glasses with curly metal “eyelashes” at the corners.
She flashed a stacked-look gold wedding band by British artist Breon O’Casey, who also made the big silver cuffs on each of her arms.
But it was hard not to stare at her elaborate Peter Skubic brooch of stainless steel, which looked like a maze of mirrors and feathers. Then there were the Georg Dobler earrings, square assemblages of colored glass. And a large Max Frölich ring that could knock a guy out if it hit him right.
MFAH curator Cindi Strauss aptly calls Drutt “a walking billboard for the field.” Not in a tacky sense, of course — it was all displayed against the clean palette of a black dress.
Even without the arty bling, Drutt can command a room. The undisputed queen of contemporary craft, she sweeps into a room with authority, seeming much taller than she is. She’s self-effacing and slightly mischievous, the sort of woman who takes you by the arm and leans in close to share a juicy story.
“She was the person who introduced America to the idea that jewelry could be something other than what is traditional,” Strauss says. (Although Strauss admits that some exhibit visitors might question the wearability of such highly conceptual works as Hiramatsu Yasuki’s Crown or David Watkins’ Hinged Loop Neckpiece With Three Bars.)
Drutt bought her first piece of art jewelry in 1968 from legendary jewelry designer Stanley Lechtzin, who pioneered the technique of electroforming, or forming metal with molds. She also met Lechtzin’s friends and students — also pioneers — and was soon collecting obsessively all over the world.
In Philadelphia, her hometown (and Lechtzin’s), she founded one of the first galleries devoted to jewelry by academic artists, also focusing on ceramics. Over about 40 years, she amassed the most important cache of contemporary art jewelry in the United States, and one of the top three in the world. The MFAH’s Drutt Collection now comprises about 800 works, representing 175 artists from 18 countries, tracing every aspect of the craft’s development.
Only about a third of it appears in Ornament as Art — and even so, the exhibit is encyclopedic.
Drutt’s delight was palpable as she once again saw brooches, necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings — as well as a few sketches — now ensconced behind Plexiglas. To her, they represent a lifetime of work and friendships.
“I feel very privileged as a layperson to have been part of this community of artists,” she said.
And while she said she never considered it “ornament,” she has worn most of the pieces in the exhibit. (One suspects, if she’d figured out how, she might have donned even the drawings.)
“I haven’t worn this, because it didn’t fit quite right,” she admitted, pressing her index finger against the case containing a gold mold of that same finger, now known officially as Gerd Rothmann’s Index Finger.
Drutt looked at her flesh finger again.
“The reason I wanted this gold finger is because I love to write,” she said, “and I wish this finger had ink in it, and I could just write with it all the time.”
Next to Index Finger sits another piece by Rothman — The Golden Nose of Helen Drutt — a mold of her nose made in 1994, which she did wear, albeit disappointingly.
“I wore it to a Salvador Dali opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts,” she explained. “I thought everyone would comment, but no one did. They must have thought I’d broken my nose. So I was just incognito the whole night.”
She stepped toward works from the late 1960s, including Albert Paley’s Double Fibula Brooch. Houstonians know Paley as the creator of the grand metal sculptures alongside the Wortham Theater Center’s elevators; but for about a decade he also made jewelry, and these pieces are rare.
Double Fibula is more than 5 1/2 inches long and wide, with a pin clasp nearly that long on the back.
“The first time I wore it, I was invited to a grand dinner party with a lot of famous artists,” Drutt said. “I wanted to be smashing. And to be innovative, I wore the brooch at my waist. Then during dinner, the clasp disengaged.”
Not far away, another slightly problematic piece caught her attention: Ken Cory’s Squash Blossom Necklace, made of tiny light bulbs, bullet shells, a bronze-cast pencil, brass and leather. “The light bulbs are fragile, so I couldn’t wear it much,” she said. “But I love the bent pencil.”
In an area featuring some especially unwearable-looking works made of alternative materials such as paper, Drutt thought about home.
“Those were on a mannequin in my library,” she said, eyeing necklaces and a headpiece by Lam de Wolf and Caroline Broadhead’s nylon monofilament Necklace / Veil. “And those laminated collars (Hiroko Sato Pijanowski and Eugene Pijanowski’s Mizuhiki) were on a vertical wall in my bedroom, arranged rather beautifully.”
At home, her collection also occupied a print drawer, a safe and several safe-deposit boxes. “I take care of things,” she said curtly.
“Oh, here’s the BOE box!,” she said, veering toward a section of the exhibit about the depth of artistic influences on contemporary jewelry — minimalism, the Bauhaus movement, you name it. This box is one of only 15 such assemblages made by a revolutionary Dutch collective in the 1970s.
“I acquired it because I happened to meet the artist at a conference,” Drutt explained. “Chance has played an amazing role.”
Drutt suggested she was driven in part by a sense of responsibility to record the history of this art form: “I acquired some of these works because people were dying and needed to be remembered.”
She has long collected living people, too. Her Philadelphia home is a famous gathering spot for visiting scholars, artists, architects and poets. That all began, she said, after her first husband, the poet Maurice English, died in 1983, and the nearby University of Pennsylvania began asking if she’d put people up. Some stayed for months. (Strauss suggests that as a result, Drutt’s home is as important today as Alfred Stieglitz’s studio was in the early 20th century.)
“It’s a lot of sheets,” Drutt quipped.
She was just warming up, getting chummy with the reporter. But she was due to give a lecture, so the museum’s staff rushed her along.
She resisted, lingering at yet another piece along a wall of “narrative” jewelry — pieces that, appropriately enough, tell stories. (Imagine a scene from Moby Dick depicted in a silver pendant.)
And she wanted to show off that ring on her left hand. In May, Drutt married Peter Stern, an art-world luminary who is president of the Storm King Art Center, a major outdoor sculpture garden in New York state.
“I’ve been alone 15 years,” she said. “I’ll be 77 in November. And our families have known each other for a long time.”
A museum staffer almost had to lead her out by the arm. Drutt hadn’t yet had breakfast, she said, and she was hungry. But not to worry, she said. Food could wait.
molly.glentzer@chron.com
October 8th, 2007
