Bright spark
Lady Gaga’s Oscars moment was unprecedented: an icon wearing an iconic gem that was last donned by Audrey Hepburn. In another first, that gem, the Tiffany diamond, recently visited Australian shores.
Did you know a diamond needs waking up? Well, if that diamond happens to have 82 facets of resplendent, lightrefracting edges, and 128.54 carats of unrivalled quality, it needs a moment, if you don’t mind, to ready itself for all that time spent pinging light around its interior and having all the coos of delight aimed at it from the hordes of people who will file past it when it is on public display.
“For quite a few years, really, every day it was my job to get it out of the safe, wake it up, make sure it looked good and get it into its display and get it going for the day,” says Melvyn Kirtley, chief gemologist and vice-president of global category marketing at Tiffany & Co., of the house darling, which lives on the top floor of the company’s Fifth Avenue, New York boutique. That is the canaryyellow, one-and-only Tiffany diamond, which has, for the first time in history, graced Australian shores to celebrate the opening of the new Sydney flagship. “It became quite a ritual for me to be working with the diamond on a daily basis, so I have quite a personal, emotional connection to it.”
He is not the only one to be taken by its charms. “The chance to work with such an amazing piece of design and history tonight is a creative dream come true,” said stylists Sandra Amador and Tom Eerebout on Oscars night. The duo stood by Lady Gaga’s side as she clasped the jewel in its 2012 setting, tweaked to fit by the select few of the house’s jewellers considered skilled enough to handle the stone, around her Oscar-bound neck. She was the first woman to ever wear the seemingly lucky, and gargantuan, talisman on the red carpet.
Every house needs its symbol, and for Tiffany, not in the business of logomania, the diamond is the hard-working reminder of the heft of the jeweller’s 182-year history. It spans the stone’s unearthing in 1877 in South Africa, purchase by Charles Tiffany a year later and Audrey Hepburn’s turn in it for the promotional images for Breakfast at Tiffany’s in a Jean Schlumberger- designed necklace in 1961. She later evoked John Keats, saying it was a “joy forever”. It is the only kind of flash the house will allow: careful and considered. The first cut of the stone took a year to get right.
And to those who may say: ‘Oh, it is just a stone’, well, did you know this gem knows how to smoulder like a practised seductress? “[It] was designed a little bit differently so that it takes that light and doesn’t
The Tiffany diamond “takes light and doesn’t blast it back to you. It hangs on to it for a moment, then gives it back in a more smouldering way”
blast it back to you,” explains Kirtley. “It hangs on to it for a moment, then gives it back in a more smouldering way.”
As many fashion commentators have noted, since the 90s we seem to have entered a kind of doldrums when it comes to era-defining style, yet this outing surely flies in the face of such chatter. And should you be lucky enough to experience first-hand its mesmerising form, take so me advice from its long-time keeper, and deliverer of its wake-up calls. “You have to ponder it: you have to really let it have its first impact on you. Then you have to look at it again … see it from all different angles, let it capture you. It’s a meditative moment. Like a wonderful work of art: let it soak in.”