Friday, September 6, 2024. A nice sunny day yesterday in New York, followed to a cooler evening with temps down to the low 60s.
Throughout the mid-century last, Kenneth Jay Lane was the artificial jeweler supreme in New York. He was a boy from Detroit, son of a man who was in the auto parts supply business. He’d attended the University of Michigan and then the Rhode Island School of Design. Somewhere in those early years he came to New York and fell in love with it.
Finished with his schooling, he came to New York to seek his dreams. He was fascinated by the Society that was very much sought after and in-fashion full time. He first worked briefly for Vogue and then went into designing footwear for Delman Shoes, and then on to Christian Dior where he trained to be a designer under Roger Vivier.
It was in 1963 at age 30 when he was designing bejeweled footwear for Arnold Scaasi and Dior that he was inspired to design and make costume jewelry.
Kenny, as he was known to his many friends, was naturally very social. He built a cosmopolitan personality that on meeting was far far from the Midwest boy, and actually more Euro, or even Brittish. Definitely international American. He had an eye for all of it, an imagination to adopt it, and a naturally friendly charm that was still the boy from Detroit.
His interests, his physical image and his personality brought him into the New York world of fashion and ultimately Society, the mid-20th century version still practicing the social self-presentation that came from their forebears (and those who wished they had them).
His personality was outgoing but with the ambience of sort of Briddish. He was by no means pretentious because his manners and style came from the boy with an eye and an imagination about real life in his “jewelry.”
His first big break came when a woman very prominent in the fashion business named Jo Hughes who worked for Bergdorf’s showed some of his pieces to the Duchess of Windsor. It was upwards all the way after that. The duchess bought and shared her find with her friends.
All of these women had major Jewelry collections but Kenny could copy them all perfectly (which thrilled the owners who bought them), and they were also charmed by Kenny’s versions of jewels to be worn, totally fake and at bargain prices. And they all look like the real thing.
Kenny became a Social Lion in a very real, but modern way. He socialized with one and all, traveled the world and lived in a magnificent apartment on Park Avenue South which was an old mansion designed by Stanford White, converted into an apartment house. Kenny made it a showplace with his own style.
His jewelry business made him rich. When he departed he left it to the man who managed and ran it for him, and it continues today, prospering because Kenny’s sense of style (when it came to jewels, especially) had a natural visual appeal. Impressive but charmed by it.
Reading about Kenny’s Dream as told to Lauren Lawrence, and having known him personally, I was fascinated to see how it all played out in his brain; and how serious it always was for the man who wore everything lightly with a torrent of creativity of the boy behind it.
SOCIETY DREAMS: Kenneth Jay Lane
by Lauren Lawrence
The Dream: I dreamt I was in the prairie somewhere. I saw a freight train running along a track, but instead of holding coal in its car, it had all the jewelry I had ever made, but without the stones. I watched as the freight car tilted back and the jewelry spilled everywhere. Then I saw a dumpster truck coming from the opposite direction, and it was carrying all of the stones. It stopped next to the pile of jewelry, tilted back and spilled the stones in a separate pile on the ground. I started the arduous task of putting back all the stones in the correct settings. What does it all mean?!
The Interpretation: The freight train running along the track represents the passage of time moving forward at an alarming speed. Although the train stops to halt the final destination, the silent engine of the train is yet another representation of death. Similarly, the prairie that signifies the lonely emptiness of the great beyond becomes filled with the designers life’s work – the jewelry of his creation. The anxiety over leaving this world is heightened by the separation anxiety symbolized by the jewels’ removal or rather disengagement from their original settings. The prongs have not held something in place. But, one understands that within the lengthy process of re-fashioning jewelry, the stones become the dreamer’s tools with which to re-assemble and realign with life, and establish immortality.
On another level of interpretation, the loose stones represent the headstones of those that have already died. This necessitates the wish to reconnect each shining essence (the individual soul) with the physical body of the jewelry … a profound encasement of what was within what will be. In this view, reconnecting the stones with the jewelry serves as a symbolic form of resurrection.
For private dream analysis, contact laurenlawrence@aol.com
