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It comes by Border's truck and is hand-delivered by security guards. It is served up on musical platters and in lighted glass vitrines at chi-chi cocktail parties. The finest jewelry in the far-out is in Hollywood during the weeks leading up to the Golden Globes and Oscars. Because no consequence how valuable a diamond may be, a photo of a celebrity wearing one on the red carpet is unique.</p><p> Award show season is the Super Bowl of celebrity organization. The world's biggest jewelry brands (Harry Winston, Cartier, Chopard, Tiffany & Co., Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arpels, Fred Leighton, Pomellato) are competing with Hollywood hometown favorites (Neil Lane, Martin Katz, Loree Rodkin), headlong newcomers (Kimberly McDonald, Stephen Webster, Solange Azagury-Partridge) and bulk-market players (Kwiat, Le Vian) for the chance to bejewel Hollywood's beauties and magnificence armchair fashion fans watching around the globe.</p><p> One sparkling shake in the celebrity spotlight can be worth millions in advertising for a jewelry brand. The styles celebrities settle upon to wear set trends that trickle all the way down to the mall's fast-fashion copycats.</p><p> "That simile of a celebrity wearing drop earrings or a dramatic necklace and all the many ways it is shown and commented on in the weeks after the awards shows ... there is no way to quantify the value," says Victoria Gomelsky, senior editor of JCK magazine, a trade publication for retail jewelers. The Tiffany tassel earrings haggard by Natalie Portman at last year's Academy Awards "had an Brobdingnagian repercussion on the market." Jewelry worn in the hair is another trend that was sparked by celebrities wearing brooches and bracelets in their awards edge of night 'dos. And Le Vian successfully changed the perception of brown diamonds by renaming them "chocolate diamonds" and lending them to Halle Berry and other celebrities to in on the red carpet.</p><p> For jewelers doing the lending, having a chess-piece on the red carpet "ratchets up the sense of mystique about a brand and creates awareness," Gomelsky says. The red carpet has become so inner to the industry that some brands are willing to pay celebrities to wear their jewelry. For last year's Academy Awards, Tiffany & Co. reportedly paid Anne Hathaway $750,000 to adopt Tiffany jewels onstage while she was hosting the event. And Gwyneth Paltrow was rumored to have picked up a $500,000 paycheck to burden pieces from Louis Vuitton's L'Ame du Voyage fine jewelry collection. (Neither tag has commented on the specifics, and it's not in a business's best interest to be too public about paying for unveiling, but over the last few years some labels have acknowledged having "contractual relationships" with stars.)</p><p> Other jewelers use cocktails and canapes to court the prominence of celebrities, hoping to build relationships and loyalties that will lead to time to come sales. Award season buzzes with parties designed to woo rich shoppers and borrowers alike.</p><p> </p><p> On a recent Tuesday edge of night at Culina at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, for instance, Jacqueline Nerguizian was plying way stylists and style influencers with Champagne and her own version of a Super Dish ring - a 4-carat center diamond surrounded by princess-cut sapphires. Although she has been in the function 20 years in Scottsdale, Ariz., it is the designer's first award show enliven.</p><p> "Why is it that guys are the only ones who can have a Super Bowl torque?" said the designer, a mother of five, dressed in a tight baneful cocktail dress. Valued at $50,000, the ring hasn't yet made it to an award show, but it did make good it to the Golden Globes nomination ceremony Dec. 15. "Fresh Family" star Sofia Vergara wore it and is now in the development of buying it, the designer confirmed.</p><p> Up on Sunset Boulevard at Bar Nineteen 12 at the Beverly Hills Bed, InStyle magazine and Forevermark, a diamond brand in the De Beers kinsfolk, were showcasing sparklers by up-and-coming jewelry designers. Actress Michelle Williams breezed through, followed by Jessica Alba. "I am only just hoping for some good placements," jewelry designer Kimberly McDonald said looking at her handiwork - two bangles with around 70 carats of irregularly sized diamonds set inside.</p><p> Earlier in the day, jeweler-to-the-stars Neil Lane's West Hollywood believe in was buzzing with security guards and fashion stylists. "I'm here to pick up for Julie Benz," a unsophisticated woman said to the representative behind the counter. "She's wearing a red chew out. We want earrings and bracelets, but no necklaces."</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> It's unyielding to pin down exactly when the practice of lending jewelry for the red carpet started. By the 1930s, Paul Flato, the native jeweler to the stars, was already lending his designs to the studios for celebrities to exhaust in films, so it is likely that they wore them on special occasions too.</p><p> But Harry Winston has prolonged claimed to have been the first to lend diamonds to a star to wear to the Academy Awards. It was 1944, and at the apply for of director David O. Selznick, a friend of the jeweler, Harry Winston lent a unite of diamond earrings to actress Jennifer Jones, who won the lead actress grant for the film "The Song of Bernadette" that year.</p><p> </p><p> The earrings aren't unmistakeable in photos, and nobody knows what happened to them afterward, but the moment has nonetheless become part of Harry Winston wisdom. The firm lends out millions of dollars worth of diamonds every year, including the $165,000 princess-cut diamond choker Gwyneth Paltrow wore with a pink Ralph Lauren ball gown when she won an Oscar for 1998's "Shakespeare in Honey." After the ceremony, Paltrow's father, Bruce. bought it for her.</p><p> </p><p> "It's a guests commitment," says Frederic de Narp, Harry Winston's president and chief boss. "We have a dedicated team, PR effort and craftsman effort. We draw from all 22 of our salons around the world so celebrities can pick and choose the most successfully of the best."</p><p> The red carpet wasn't the international grandeur fashion phenomenon that it is today until the 1990s, when Giorgio Armani saw an break and began dressing Hollywood for award shows.</p><p> Jeweler Martin Katz didn't be sure what he was in for when Sharon Stone called him in 1992 asking to borrow a wonder necklace and earrings to wear to the premiere of "Basic Predisposition."</p><p> "I said, 'Borrow?'" Katz remembers. "If she breaks it or loses it, it's too bad, Martin. And it's not as if she was succeeding to wear a sandwich board with my name on it." Katz agreed on one persuade: that Stone wear his jewelry while doing magazine publicity for the film and that his name be in the vogue credits.</p><p> That simple agreement changed Katz's profession and the red carpet forever. "My phone started ringing off the foul," he says. "I had to hire publicists to deal with the phone calls. Jewelers around the community were offering me pieces to put on celebs; people were even giving me scripts to show celebs." Over the years, he's bejeweled a bevy of stars. One of his favorite looks was from the 1997 Oscars, when Nicole Kidman paired his Indian-looking diamond earrings with her Asian-inspired chartreuse John Galliano doctor reprimand.</p><p> Fortunately, there haven't been too many calamities along the way. But one notable accident occurred at the 1998 Oscars, when Minnie Driver's ruby bracelet snagged and flat. "A couple dozen rubies went flying. She was on her hands and knees with James Cameron, and luckily they found them all," Katz remembers.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> Although he can't act the results of each placement in one-to-one sales, he says the media attention has been of inestimable. Katz went from working on his kitchen table in a one-bedroom apartment to working in his own salon on Brighton Way in Beverly Hills.</p><p> </p><p> The broadening of the Internet has made celebrity endorsements even more valuable, he says. A single emplacing lives for perpetuity on websites and blogs and can reach billions of people.</p><p> But Katz and other smaller jewelers have found it harder to fence in recent years because so many jewelers have started playing the game and some are content to pay for red carpet exposure.</p><p> "Last year, I had one of my favorite actresses lined up. And wretchedly, one of the houses gave her and her stylist watches as gifts to wear their jewelry," he says.</p><p> Katz says some of his competitors have celebrities on their payrolls as well. "In the last five or six years, agents have started making deals. ... To me, if you skilled in it's a paid endorsement, it changes the complexion and perception," he says.</p><p> </p><p> Another jeweler who has benefited from weighty-profile exposure is Neil Lane, who started out in 1989 with a bar at the Antiquarious antique center on Beverly Boulevard. He met his first celebrity clients because they wandered in, often after meetings with their agents at Oecumenical Creative Management nearby.</p><p> His big break came with Renee Zellweger, who wore a choice black James Galanos gown and Neil Lane Art Deco-era jewelry to the 2001 Rosy Globes, where she won best actress in a comedy for "Nurse Betty." He remembers her coming into the against with her gown in a garment bag.</p><p> Since then, he's lent jewels to Charlize Theron, Madonna, Jennifer Hudson and countless others. His supply is full of jewels that have been worn by celebrities, not that he advertises them as such. But he can identify the diamond and platinum flip-flop brooches Eva Longoria wore to the 2011 Golden Globes and the bracelet he purchased from Mae West's caste that was worn by Catherine Zeta-Jones in the film "Chicago."</p><p> "A lot of celebrities who were buying my (blend) rings asked me to borrow jewelry for the red carpet," he says. "Or I loaned them jewelry for the red carpet, and then they bought my rings. It's very symbiotic, not a one-picture deal."</p><p> Lane has become something of a celebrity himself, as the official promise ring maker for ABC's "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette." And, in the same way dernier cri designers capitalize on the exposure they get from doing runway shows by spinning off more-affordable spare fashion lines, Lane has capitalized on the attention he has received on the red carpet by launching the Neil Lane Marriage collection at Kay Jewelers nationwide.</p><p> Although he does not pay celebrities to fray his jewelry, Lane sees the pay-for-play red carpet deals happening. But no affair how much money is changing hands, relationships still have more value in the long run, he says.</p><p> "Hollywood is an fabulous vehicle for exposure," he says. "If I was still in Brooklyn, I don't imagine I would be the guy I am today.
Source: Kansas City Star