A Costume Jewelry Brand That Honors Its Fine Jewelry Start

Queens do it. Very first women do it. Even Madeleine Albright and Elizabeth Taylor did it: Dress in Ciner jewels.

And for superior motive: Ciner makes what the jewellery historian Melinda L. Lewis known as “the equal of the crown jewels” of costume jewelry — items produced with semiprecious stones, simulated gems, crystal and silver or other metals, usually plated with gold or rhodium.

One particular hundred thirty several years right after its founding as a great jewelry model, Ciner states it is the only costume jewelry maker in The united states that continue to fabricates each piece by hand from commence to finish, typically utilizing the authentic styles manufactured by Emanuel Ciner, its founder.

A staff of 15 — now all women — creates a lot more than 1,000 items just about every thirty day period in the New York Town places of work of Ciner (pronounced SIGH-ner), supervised by Pat Ciner Hill, Emanuel Ciner’s granddaughter, who runs the organization with the help of her daughter, Jean.

Ms. Ciner Hill mentioned the business maintains the higher-top quality stone-setting, enameling and modeling procedures produced by her grandfather, no matter if it is building business jewels or the a person-of-a-variety, bespoke costume items that have acquired Ciner a lot of its acclaim.

In reality, the business remains so organization in its commitment to tradition that Kris Ciulla, the vice president of sales and design and style, states she recoils when shoppers present to deliver a laptop or computer-aided structure for use on a custom made piece. “We get the job done with versions,” she claimed. “No 3-D imagery.”

Several of those people designs, which the company describes as miniature sculptures, are the basis for what Ms. Ciulla identified as “Frankensteining”: making use of facts of previous Ciner patterns in a new piece.

For example, when Danielle Blanco, the company’s imaginative director, learned a fowl cage appeal in the archives, she incorporated it into a pair of 18-karat gold plated earrings ($595), every single one particular that includes a chook atop a cage draped in bouquets and a cascade of rhinestones. In yet another illustration, crystal and jet rhinestone beads tailored from a pair of 1980s earrings adorn a glass pearl necklace initial built all around 2010 ($625).

The unique types are aspect of the Ciner legacy, which started in 1888 when Emanuel Ciner, then 24, apprenticed with a fine jeweler in New York Town. He confirmed these talent that the jeweler insisted Mr. Ciner marry his daughter, “but he required very little to do with it,” Ms. Ciulla stated.

As a substitute, Mr. Ciner set up his personal organization in 1892, with his sons, Charles and Irwin, joining in the mid-1920s. (Irwin Ciner was Ms. Ciner Hill’s father.)

But when the wonderful jewelry marketplace collapsed during the Great Despair, Mr. Ciner rather commenced making costume gems, swapping greater-stop materials for base metals, silver, semiprecious stones and fake gems whilst retaining the superior artistry of wonderful jewellery, together with person casts, prong settings and chains assembled backlink by hyperlink.

His do the job gained acclaim between the wealthy, who frequently desired so-identified as journey jewelry — parts that would look as very good as the genuine factor, but would pose considerably less financial danger if lost or stolen on a journey, Ms. Ciner Hill stated in a the latest movie interview. Around the next numerous years, the Ciners perfected the use of tin and other white metallic alloys, as effectively as patented the mould-generating and casting processes the enterprise even now works by using.

The archives have been critical to Ciner’s endurance, Ms. Lewis, the jewelry historian, said: “All their models are existing, however they embody variations from the previous, so anything is fresh new and new, but has factors that are nostalgic and historic.”

But Ms. Ciner Hill and her staff attribute the company’s longevity to a much more individual Ciner characteristic. Like the company’s founder, who turned to munitions manufacturing to hold Ciner going throughout Globe War II, “we pivot in the instant,” Ms. Blanco mentioned. “If we just cannot do that, we’ll do this. If we simply cannot find it here, we’ll search somewhere else.” It is this mix of innovation and tradition, potentially, that explains the vary of Ciner admirers more than the many years, from Queen Sofia of Spain and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the designer Carolyne Roehm and “The Actual Housewives of Miami” star Ana Quincoces.

To commemorate its anniversary, the business has manufactured an earring, necklace, and bracelet that includes its signature tiger head, initially developed in the 1980s, encrusted with white Austrian crystals accented with black enamel and blue Bohemian glass cabochons, and set in weighty 18-karat gold plate.

The assortment, which debuted on-line and at boutiques close to the earth earlier this thirty day period, celebrates what Ms. Ciner Hill named the essence of the Ciner model. “Our long run is tied to our earlier mainly because our earlier has the archives and the quality and integrity of our solutions,” she mentioned. “After 130 decades, the past will have to be an integral element of the long term.”