From Adler to Zendaya: A New Jewelry Encyclopedia

New York Times

17 hours ago

Three years ago, Phaidon publishing house asked Melanie Grant, then an editor at The Economist, if she would be interested in compiling a new encyclopedia of jewelry.
She just about 'bit their hand off,' she said during a telephone interview from her home in London. 'I thought, 'We could put some interesting people in there.''
Now 'The Jewelry Book,' a 328-page volume ($79.95), is scheduled for publication Sept. 24. It features 300 jewelry-related personalities, including collectors, dealers and jewelers from the 16th century to today.
Organized in alphabetical order, the book begins with A, for the Swiss jeweler Adler, and runs to Z, for Zendaya, a Bulgari ambassador. Heritage names include Jean Schlumberger, who designed the Bird on a Rock for Tiffany & Company in 1965. There are also contemporary designers such as Valérie Messika of Paris and Feng Ji of Shanghai and trendy brands like Gabby Elan Jewelry of New York City, which has made custom grills for the likes of Rihanna and Marc Jacobs. (Free exhibitions of work by some of the jewelers in the book are scheduled at Sotheby's New York from Sept. 10 to 21 and the Elisabetta Cipriani gallery in London from Sept. 22 to 27.)
Seventeen jewelry experts, including Emily Stoehrer, the senior curator of jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, agreed to be on an advisory panel. They were 'much more knowledgeable of antique and vintage jewelry,' Ms. Grant said, as 'my speciality is more contemporary jewelry.' (She collaborated with Sotheby's in 2021 on 'Brilliant and Black: A Jewelry Renaissance,' an exhibition featuring 21 Black jewelry designers that Sotheby's described as the first of its kind by a major auction house.)
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.