Kenneth Jay Lane
Flamboyant king of costume jewellery whose faux baubles bedecked socialites and fashionistas
KENNETH JAY LANE, who has died aged 85, was a Manhattan jeweller and socialite who singlehandedly made costume jewellery cool; the meticulously made interpretations of classic Cartier and Verdura jewels that Lane introduced during his Sixties heyday – rendered from gold-plated metal set with glass “emeralds’’, resin “jade’’ and plastic “turquoise’’ – were worn by the Duchess of Windsor, Diana Vreeland and Audrey Hepburn.
Lane once said that a “woman can be just as glamorous in costume jewellery as in million-dollar bangles and beads’’, and he made what he was fond of calling fake (spelt “faque”) or junk (spelt “junque”) jewellery fashionable among women who could afford the real thing. Yet he was not particular about his clientele, also hawking his wares on the homeshopping network QVC.
When Christie’s New York held a sale of his creations in 2001, the sheer range of his imagination was breathtaking. Faux jewels, estimated at prices ranging from $200 to $4,000, included classic “pearls”; serpent bangles in vibrant enamels; bulbous, David Webb-inspired, clusters; dazzling belts and 18th-century-style courtly jewels dripping with faux rose diamonds. He drew inspiration from Chinese, Egyptian, Aztec and Indian designs, and was as capable of capturing the opulence of the orient as the glamour of Art Deco. “I’ve plundered every civilisation you can think of and some more you can’t. I love them all,” he said.
Whatever its derivation, a piece of “KJL” jewellery was recognisable by its weightiness, its sense of colour, and by the confidence of its modelling. Metalwork was brilliant and textured; enamels were glossy; and the stones, many made by Swarovski in Austria, had a depth and richness just like the real thing. His target customer was the woman who has fun dressing up, “not the trophy wife who wants a trophy diamond so she can run off with the trophy boyfriend”.
Once described as “one of the most in-demand unattached men, not only in New York but in cities on several continents”, Lane had good looks, wit, elegance and eccentricity that endeared him to everyone from Princess Margaret to Andy Warhol. A photograph in the Christie’s sale catalogue showed him as a young dandy, in harem pants, lounging among exotic animal skins and potted palms. While his slightly languid voice may once have been affected, with time it became as much a part of him as the upper-class British inflections he acquired on trips across the Atlantic.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Diane von Furstenberg and Bianca Jagger (and more recently Sienna Miller, Elle Macpherson and Sarah Jessica Parker) were just a few of the socialites and fashionistas who could not do without their “Kennies”. Lane designed the triple-strand pearl choker worn by Barbara Bush to her husband’s inauguration ball (she wore it so often, she claimed, that if she removed it, her head would fall off ).
After her jewel collection was stolen, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney declared: “I’ve got to get some of that Kenneth Lane stuff fast.”
While Lane credited his early success to chance, his social connections did him no harm and some of his customers became good friends. He travelled to Egypt with Diane von Furstenberg; sipped Bloody Marys by Oscar de la Renta’s pool in the Dominican Republic; had lunch with Greta Garbo and was a houseguest of Brooke Astor at her summer place in Tuscany. He attended dinners at Blenheim and with Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace, and became great friends with the Duchess of Windsor, who was rumoured to have been buried wearing a jewelled belt Lane created for her.
Lane, who also designed the jewels worn by Faye Dunaway when she played Mrs Simpson on television, recalled the duchess as a likeable woman with an earthy sense of humour, who (despite rumours to the contrary) “always paid her bills”.
They had met in the Sixties through Diana Vreeland, and Lane would recall an outing he and the duchess took to Annette de la Renta’s family estate in New Jersey in 1972. The route they chose went through Times Square, where they passed a cinema hoarding advertising Deep Throat. “Oh, my God!
Deep Throat … Would you take me?” asked the duchess. “I said, ‘If you insist,’ but I never did,” Lane recalled.
When Sotheby’s had a sale of her jewellery about 10 years after she died, there were 18 Kenneth Lane pieces, which sold for huge prices.
His social connections gave Lane access to fabulous collections of real jewels, and he plucked his ideas from wherever he was and whoever he was with. Thus one of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s necklaces, given to her by Aristotle Onassis in 1968, was incorporated into the Kenneth Lane range and became a bestseller. A jewelled belt in the collection of the Duchess of Buccleuch was turned by Lane into a must-have Sixties fashion accessory, while in the Seventies a Victorian snake bracelet on the wrist of Marella Agnelli was adapted into a range of enamelled bangles in animal motifs such as jaguars, elephants and tigers. “I have seen him mentally photograph any jewel that takes his fancy at a party,” wrote the fashion designer Mary Mcfadden. “Magically, it appears for sale in his showroom.”
On occasion, the tables were turned: Elizabeth Taylor bought a pair of his chandelier earrings at a shop in Paris, and had them copied in diamonds – “knocked mine off for the real thing,” as Lane put it. In 1980 Ivana Trump’s huge KJL crystal scattered eardrops were remade by the “King of Diamonds”, Laurence Graff. Such plagiarism was not always successful and Lane would recall a countess who, unbeknown to him, had had one of his pieces re-done in real jewels. “‘That’s an ugly piece of jewellery,’ I told her, and then she told me what she’d done,” he said. “Well, in real gems, it did look ugly.”
Kenneth Jay Lane was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 22 1932 and educated at the University of Michigan and at Rhode Island School of Design. In 1954 he moved to New York and reinvented himself as a bright young dandy and sophisticate, joining the art department of Vogue as a layout assistant to Alexander Lieberman.
He then took a job with Roger Vivier, designing shoes for Christian Dior and Arnold Scaasi and commuting between Paris and New York. He became so captivated by the gilt baubles and rhinestones that were used to trim shoes that in 1962 he began to experiment with making his own “jewels”.
Initially he gave them away to friends and struggled to find commercial outlets. But then the New
York Times noticed them being worn by socialites, and the orders began coming in. Diana Vreeland featured his designs in the pages of Harper’s
Bazaar and Vogue and within two years Lane had given up the day job. In addition to his American outlets, Lane had boutiques in London and Paris.
Lane lived like an eastern potentate in one of the few surviving mansions on Park Avenue, dripping with leopard skins and Orientalist masterpieces. In 1974 he made it on to Vanity Fair’s International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.
In 1975 – to the astonishment of those who knew him – Lane married Nicola Waymouth, an English woman 16 years his junior whom he had met through Andy Warhol. They were divorced within two years, although they remained friends.
In 1996 Lane released a memoir entitled Faking It.
Kenneth Jay Lane, born April 22 1932, died July 20 2017