A Brilliant Move.(investing in jewelry)

Byline: Photographed by Steven Meisel

Authentic or costume, the smartest investment to make now, says Plum Sykes, is contemporary jewelry, modern in design, timeless in appeal.

With housing prices down, the market off, and oil at record highs, I can't say my husband's thoughts have recently turned to buying diamond baubles for his beloved wife. Most mornings he frowns at the business section of the newspaper and declares, "We must buy more oil!" But last December, while The New York Times had pronounced that "consumers remain deeply skeptical about the economy," Sotheby's sold a Cartier choker of gumdrop-size natural pearls, once owned by the duchess of Windsor and since 1987 by Calvin and Kelly Klein, for $3.625 million. Mr. Klein had paid $733,333 for the necklace. Maybe, I tell my husband, we should all buy more natural pearls.

I'm not digressing when I ask you to turn your attention to purses for a moment. If you're one of those women who were sucked into It-bagdom and came out feeling empty, burned, or wishing that you'd spent the price of ten It bags on one exquisite piece of jewelry, which now might be worth the price of 20 It bags at auction, it's not too late. With the price of clothing skyrocketing (you can pay $12,000 for a skirt at Louis Vuitton), jewelry--selling like gangbusters at stores like Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Barneys--suddenly seems like the better deal.

Today's collectibles are coming from contemporary jewelers set to become as influential as the famously inventive Suzanne Belperron, who designed for the duchess of Windsor. "I go for conceptual or imaginative pieces, eccentric and surrealist rather than pretty," says jewelry designer and collector Liz Goldwyn. "I like to mix a Van Cleef & Arpels gold-and-diamond-pave Cadenas watch, which is a 1935 design, with my own designs and the pieces I have from my grandmother and mother." Meanwhile, London jeweler Shaun Leane, who designs all the jewelry for Alexander McQueen, tells me he has been creating an extraordinary "chain-mail-and-diamond evening glove" for Daphne Guinness, a task two years and counting in the making. (Alexander McQueen is designing a couture dress for Guinness to wear with the glove.) Unconcerned with the amount of precious stones in a piece or the number of carats in a diamond, the new collectors are interested in design; in fact, some of the most collectible modern jewelry is costume.

Tom Binns, a Northern Irishman based in Venice Beach, California, is the ultimate costume jeweler. His idea of a necklace is a handful of paste and ropes of fake pearls thrown artfully together that sits on the clavicle like a punkish, avant-garde choker. He calls that necklace the Drunken Disco Pearls. Or he'll splash a classical rhinestone collar with neon-yellow paint. "I always think of my jewelry as art, not craft," Binns says by phone. "That's what the value is of something: It's not that it's made of junk pearls all bunged together--it's the way I did it." When I ask him the price of one of his necklaces his only response is "You can beg, borrow, or steal those necklaces!"

The more fashionable the jeweler, the more begging, borrowing, and stealing has to be done. One New York heiress who prefers to remain anonymous tells me that although she owns JAR and vintage Van Cleef, all she really wants is a piece from Daniel Brush, a New York--based sculptor who makes jewelry to relax. Apparently, he's a recluse who eats the same thing for breakfast and lunch every day in order to focus solely on his work. Brush's most famous piece of jewelry is the Bunny Bangle, a pastel-pink Bakelite bracelet engraved with rabbits and set with a pink pave-diamond bunny on the top. The late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan told Brush he kept several of his objets de vertu on his nightstand.