For Tiffany, Fifth Avenue face-lift starts at home
NEW YORK — Since joining Tiffany & Co. in January as chief artistic officer, Reed Krakoff has undertaken to freshen the image of the 180-year-old jewelry company. His first major footprint is on the fourth-floor home and accessories floor of Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue flagship, where the sacred and the profane are now commingling cheerfully.
“The main thing we were trying to bring back was that aesthetic of the extraordinary as well as the everyday,” Krakoff said. Which is how the world came to know the Tiffany Tin Can (actually sterling silver and vermeil, $1,000), whose humble shape and unhumble price tag set the internet a-dither last week. (“When panhandling before the big riot, don’t be caught without this stunning $1,000 tin can from Tiffany’s.”)
Tiffany is a luxury purveyor, and luxury in everything, from dog bowls to baby combs to teakettles, is to be expected. Krakoff’s injection of levity is not an unwelcome twist on the usual gilded or silvered theme. “We’re just getting started,” he said.
Krakoff explains the thinking behind the new design:
Old luxury: Founder’s portrait. New luxury: Founder’s portrait in Sheetrock screws and plywood. Charles Lewis Tiffany hangs in screw-head bas-relief, brought to topographic life by the artist Andrew Myers. “Instead of doing a typical portrait or a traditional take on representing our heritage, we thought it would be interesting to juxtapose that with something that was handmade, and that has an irreverence to it,” Krakoff said. “That irreverence combined with craftsmanship and modernity is very important to the whole project.”
The floor is divided into semi-enclosed sections, each with its own distinctive furnishings and décor. “The first thing the team and I wanted to accomplish was to create a space that could’ve been part of Tiffany history,” Krakoff said. “To take this neoclassical interior, bright and light and simple, and juxtapose that with surprise, modernity and the unexpected.”
Behind a glass display, an apothecary-meets-mad-science display promotes Tiffany’s new fragrance (notes of vert de mandarine, noble iris, patchouli and musk, $130). “One of the fundamental goals of this floor is to bring the magic and extraordinary creativity of the Tiffany window into the store itself,” Krakoff said. “Think of the windows of Gene Moore in the ‘60s that juxtaposed a toy steam shovel with a pile of sand and an extraordinary diamond in a Tiffany setting. I wanted to be sure to capture that spirit, of an offhanded luxury.”
Tiffany’s robin’s-egg blue is so associated with the company that it is a registered trademark. “It’s such a gift,” Krakoff said. “The idea is to use it in unexpected ways.” It’s used liberally throughout the space, both in the home collections and as a decorating element: on the upholstered walls of the baby section, say, or on the bicycle that’s perched above eye level in a section of holiday ornaments and pet goods. “It’s a beautiful bike technically,” Krakoff said. It is not for sale.
When lady and lap dog must match, Tiffany’s pet collection is here to oblige. A new range harks back to a collection of old: the Return to Tiffany line of charms, each numbered so that if they were lost, a good Samaritan could return them to Tiffany, which would be able to locate the owner. And now: its owner’s owner. “We took that tag and attached it to bridle leather” for a dog leash, Krakoff said. “It’s all made in Italy. It’s utilitarian but authentic.” Tiffany’s entry-level dog bowls read, merely, “dog.” — bone china, $125 for a small version and $175 for a large — but on display is a sterling silver option that Joan Rivers had engraved for her dog, Spike, for those inspired to go bigger ($1,800 for a small version, $2,500 for a large). Not recommended for cat play: Tiffany’s sterling silver ball of yarn, $9,000.
Krakoff decided to use the ampersand from the Tiffany logo as a kind of proxy for its home and accessories collection: “Tiffany and home, Tiffany and everyday objects — the ampersand became that symbol,” he said. Along the stairwell to the third floor, a team of artists hand-stenciled every ampersand. “It was kind of an amazing exercise and amazing that they could accomplish something like that by hand,” Krakoff said. For the lighting, he commissioned the designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec to create a porcelain fixture of strung-together cups, about 20 feet long. “It’s a loose reference to jewelry, not literally,” Krakoff said. “A beacon to keep people interested in one floor above.”