Old Hollywood Mixes with the Modern in Jewelry Exhibit
It’s a don’t-you-dare-miss-it experience. Hollywood design legends, Tony Duquette and Hutton Wilkinson, will have their designs featured in a first-ever, all-jewelry exhibit, More is More: Tony Duquette – Hutton Wilkinson Jewelry, on Oct. 10 at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) in Carlsbad, Calif.
The exhibit will include more than 50 jewelry creations embracing a wide range of styles, periods and palettes. Often, the pieces showcase unusual gemstones paired with rare materials to create a whimsical design.
“Duquette and Wilkinson’s jewelry make a show-stopping statement. Someone wearing these pieces would not go unnoticed,” said Terri Ottaway, curator of the GIA Museum. “It is amazing to see the unusual gemstone choices they made – and astonishing to see how well these unconventional materials work together.”
Before Duquette’s death in 1999, he worked with his business partner and design collaborator, Wilkinson, for more than 30 years. Famous clients of the team included
The Duchess of Windsor, Doris Duke, Buddy Rogers, J. Paul Getty and Elizabeth Arden. Their bold and theatrical jewelry designs draw inspiration from their notable work as costume and set designers during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Wilkinson continues to create pieces for the “Tony Duquette Collection” using their favorite materials such as malachite, pearls, emerald and coral. Wilkinson described these jewelry designs as bold, theatrical, extravagant, Byzantine and sometimes even barbaric.
“They chose color for inspiration rather than searching for perfection in the gems,” said Larry Larson, a gemology instructor at GIA. “They always seemed to go for strength rather than the merely pretty.”
McKenzie Santimer, project manager of exhibit development at GIA, said she first saw the designs for the exhibit two years ago and described them as “wild, fun, unconventional … and to have an exhibit like this with those types of pieces just helps us also teach and share the world of gemology, that’s what we are about here at GIA. So to have combinations of abalone shell and diamonds or shark teeth with malachite, it is just pretty wild.”
Duquette began his career with interior design and costumes, before going into jewelry design. “That is not a very usual, conventional path that we see in our industry. You know, people have a passion for gems and jewelry who just come to GIA to get more education, to get refined, to get their certificate and move on versus seeing this design is really unique,” Santimer said. “Tony’s eye for his color combinations and using old pieces with salvaged new pieces is really just amazing to all come together and look really attractive. They’re all really big statement pieces and one of the quotes Hutton always says is ‘if it’s not fabulous, it’s meaningless.’ That kind of says it all and encapsulates the kind work that they do.”
The exhibit will run through March 2014 and featured pieces on loan from personal collectors and The Anthony and Elizabeth Duquette Foundation for the Living Arts.
For more details, visit GIA’s website or call 800-421-7250.
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