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 The Day
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| The view of Central Park and Fifth Avenue from Verdura's salon. |
Yesterday was a beautiful day in New York. The second day of fashion week. I was scheduled for a 10 o’clock show over on Columbus Circle. I couldn’t get there on time. Then JH and I had a meeting at 11 at Verdura. We were both a little late.
Verdura is doing an exhibition of their private collection of original pieces at the Houston Museum opening at the beginning of October. Besides their own archive, they’ve also been lent pieces from a number of their prominent customers.
Verdura, if you didn’t know (and once upon a time, I didn’t know) is a jewelry business started in 1939 by Fulco Verdura, a Sicilian duke (the duc di Verdura). He was backed by Linda and Cole Porter, among others, and was soon the darling of society. Fulco got his start working with Coco Chanel.
Fulco was not only purveyor to the rich, he was their pal (or vice versa). In his atelier on the second floor of what is now Henri Bendel on Fifth Avenue between 55th and 56th Street, friends would come by to visit as well as to order. Fulco would entertain while gathering inspiration and spreading his wit, both wicked and silly. He was a great success. The most fashionable people in social New York and elsewhere would come to call, anxious to buy his clever and amusing designs, including many tycoons of the day. While there were other independent designer/retailers, Verdura had added cachet provoked by that wit. And that title.
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| Dorothy Hart Hearst Paley (later Hirshon), New York, 1938. |
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| Verdura's sketch of the famous emerald scarf necklace designed for Dorothy Paley in 1941. |
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The work, it turned out, had its own life; a long one. Yesterday, Nico Landrigan whose father Ward has owned the Verdura business for the past thirty years (Fulco Verdura retired in the early 70s and sold the business) showed us quite a few pieces of the collection that will make up the Houston exhibition.
In the 40 years he was in business Fulco made about 10,000 designs, all of which are still in the Verdura archive, many of which were customed designed for his lofty customers, the crème de la crème of international society and celebrity. Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Astors (Brooke Astor had an enormous collection of Verdura pieces that she started selling about ten years ago). Movie stars, heiresses, dowagers and princes (the duke of Windsor) came to Fulco’s atelier to special order their jeweled fantasies. 50, 40, 30 years ago, a brooch of gold or platinum and accommodating precious and semi-precious stones sold in the hundreds, and very occasionally the low thousands. It’s interesting, in reflection, that Fulco Verdura prospered during economic hard times. Those who could, were not shy about purchasing jewelry, often, if not always regarding the re-sale value. Those pieces first sold all those decades ago for a few hundred dollars, today go at auction in the low to middle six figures. And the demand remains the same.
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| Babe Paley, 1948. Jewelry by Verdura. |
One good customer was William Paley, the founder of CBS. William Paley had two very stylish wives, first Dorothy and then Babe. Or you could also say: two very stylish women, Dorothy and then Babe, married William Paley. For better or for worse.
In the better department, Mr. Paley was fond of giving his wives jewelry. And, as was the style of those times, Mr. Paley liked having a hand in the design. In this way, both couples (same husband) shared a very strong aesthetic sense, although the women, not so much the man, were gifted with a strong visual sense of style. Both women are well represented in the upcoming Houston Museum exhibition.
Nico showed us the sketch of the design for an emerald scarf necklace that Fulco made in the early 1940s for Dorothy Paley. The Paleys had taken a tour of South America and after their return, Dorothy went into Fulco’s shop one day with a big bag of emeralds she’d acquired in Colombia. She asked Fulco to design a necklace for them, specifying that she wanted something she could wear “in daytime.” To the Colony (restaurant) for lunch, for example.
The result was astonishing, now a classic. Dorothy (then Hirshon), who died at 90 in 1998, had sold the necklace several years earlier – for a price, whatever it was, far, far above the original cost.
The second Mrs. Paley, Barbara (Babe) Cushing, was like her predecessor, a beautiful fashion plate who drew attention wherever she went. In her day – from the late 40s through the mid-70s, Babe Paley’s “taste” was elevated almost to godliness in fashion essays and bibles. She had an unerring eye, a brilliant style editor, as it were, and was probably one of the greatest trophy wives in the American mid-century. She loved beautiful things and again, her husband shared her interest, or at least understood it. |
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| A pair of natural black and white pearl torsade bracelets with pearl and diamond clasps, created for Babe Paley. |
Today Verdura is on the 12th floor at 745 Fifth Avenue. From the salon, designed by Richard Keith Langham (see NYSD HOUSE) where we were viewing the collection, you can look down on the Apple cube next door, as well as the Sherry-Netherland across the way, the gold and sooty General William Tecumseh Sherman statue, the not-quite-finished refurbished Plaza and Central Park in all its glory. It was a jewel. And I felt for a moment that direct relationship between what I could see from the window and what I could see of one man’s imagination on the table before me.
We left the Verdura salon about one and headed over to Michael’s for the ground rib-eye cheeseburger (Roquefort for me, gruyere for JH) with tomato, arrugula, onion and a heaping mountain of French fries. Every now and then is enough. $33. each; (the burgers, not the fries).
Michael’s was buzzing. In the bay, Barbara Walters was having a small birthday lunch for Princess Firyal. Gil Shiva, Casey, Ribicoff, Lynn Nesbit were the ones I could see from my table. My regular table at Michael’s is situated between the entry, near the bar and on the edge of the main diningroom.
Quite by accident it’s the most ideal table for a reporter to cover a business like Michael’s. I often see almost everyone who comes and goes. Some days there are interesting surprises. Yesterday it was Michael Milken, the most famous investment banker in the 1980s, the man who invented Junk Bonds. Now, his toupee long gone, his philanthropies in the news, he looked like a guy who was quite happy to be alive and possibly (I’m guessing now) quite happy to be free of institutional Wall Street at this stage of the game. Jaunty too. |
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