The story behind Lady Gaga’s 128-carat yellow diamond Oscars necklace, last worn by Audrey Hepburn
The feathered gowns, the Hollywood pin-up hairstyles, the high-drama trains… Lady Gaga appears to be determined that her promotional wardrobe for A Star is Born will go down in fashion history. And nowhere is her penchant for Old-Hollywood glamour more apparent than in her jewels.
It started with the extraordinary Chopard diamond earrings she wore for the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September; part of the Queen of Kalahari suite of jewellery, they featured a 25-carat pear-cut diamond and a 26-carat heart-shape diamond, just two of the 23 stones cut from the same 342-carat rough diamond. There was the suite of Tiffany & Co diamonds, over 100 carats in total, she wore while channeling Judy Garland at the Golden Globes.
And then, at last night’s Oscars, she raised the bejewelled bar once again by draping her neck with one of the world’s largest yellow diamonds.
The 128.54-carat Tiffany Diamond is a treasured part of Tiffany’s archive collection - meaning it is categorically not for sale - and is usually kept under lock and key in a display cabinet in the brand’s Fifth Avenue flagship: as much of a tourist attraction as the Tiffany Blue Book café a few floors above.
The cushion-cut diamond was hewn from a 287.42-carat rough stone discovered in South Africa’s Kimberley mine in 1877. The cutting process took 12 months and was overseen by George Frederick Kunz, Tiffany’s chief gemmologist at the time.
When it was finished, Tiffany’s founder Charles Lewis Tiffany decided not to sell it but to keep it on display for the public, and the Tiffany Diamond, as it was named, became the star attraction at exhibitions and events throughout the late 19th and 20th century; a symbol of Tiffany & Co’s diamond expertise.
It has been widely reported that the diamond is worth $30 million, but in fact it has only ever been offered for sale once: in 1972 Tiffany & Co ran an advert which declared the Tiffany Diamond to be the ultimate ‘Limited Edition’, for sale for 24 hours only at a price of $5 million.
“In our judgement, past history and everything else considered, it will easily be worth $10 million one hundred years from now,” ran the ad.
Despite several designs being created for the Tiffany Diamond over the decades, it has, in fact, only been worn in public three times. The first was at the 1957 Tiffany Feather Ball, a charity gala, when it was mounted on a white diamond necklace for Mrs Mary Whitehouse.
The second was in the promotional images for the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1951, where Audrey Hepburn can be seen wearing the diamond set into the Ribbon Rosette necklace, which had been designed by Tiffany’s famed designer Jean Schlumberger in the 1950s.
The stone had a starring turn in the film when Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly, declared that she “doesn’t give a hoot about jewellery except diamonds - like that” - pointing to the gargantuan gem.
Hepburn’s sculptural, intricate necklace was just one of a number of designs Schlumberger envisaged for the stone; his ‘wardrobe of settings’ for the Tiffany Diamond was published in Vogue in 1956, and demonstrated how captivated the jeweller was by the gem.
Sadly he wouldn’t live to see another of his designs come to life: in 1995, after his death, the stone was set into his ‘Bird on a Rock’ brooch design, for a retrospective at the Museé des Art Décoratif, and it remained in that setting for several years.
The diamond’s third outing on Lady Gaga was the first time it has ever appeared on the red carpet. It was set into a custom-made white diamond necklace, which echoed a design created in 2012 to mark Tiffany’s 175th anniversary. Comprising 62 white diamonds alongside the priceless central gemstone, the necklace was matched by a custom-made pair of white and yellow diamond earrings.
This latest chapter in the story of the Tiffany Diamond is emblematic of Tiffany’s chief artistic officer Reed Krakoff’s approach to fine jewellery. Since being appointed in 2017, Krakoff has been on a mission to breathe new life into the historic house and “loosen the formality” of diamonds.
In his eyes, diamonds are meant to be worn and enjoyed, not kept to gather dust in a safe. Judging by the smile on Lady Gaga’s face as she posed on the Oscars red carpet (followed closely, presumably, by a bevy of bodyguards), it’s an approach that works wonders.
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