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Jewels sparkle in life
and on film
Long a hit with celebrities,
Me & Ro jewelry will be seen
in "Memoirs of a Geisha"
Jewelry designer Robin Renzi has never been big on the bling factor, making her subtle pieces out of place in a society that often measures glamour by the size of one's baubles, but these days it seems that more people are coming around to her way of thinking.
Renzi and Michele Quan are the partners behind Me & Ro, a company whose jewelry has long been a hit with celebrities, and will be seen by millions this fall with the film debut of "Memoirs of a Geisha."
Costume designer Coleen Atwood, introduced to the world of Me & Ro through actress Julia Roberts, asked Renzi to design the jewelry worn in the film starring Ziyi Zhang, Li Gong and Michelle Yeoh.
"(Coleen) called me last September, and of course I had read the book and loved it," Renzi said. "She sent me all these really old pieces, not real geisha hair combs, but inspired by them. I was in the process of creating our January 2005 collection, but after I got the hair combs done, so many ideas came out of it that I completely changed what I was doing for January," Renzi said.
"I was designing flowers because geishas wear a lot of flower designs in their hair combs and in their kimonos. I've always designed flowers, but these were hard to do, because with flowers it's hard to not have them be too corny or too literal."
She studied books of geisha images. "Some of the pieces they wore were huge -- big, beautiful headdresses. But for the movie they couldn't be huge."
After all, the jewelry couldn't outshine the cast. Her consolation was free reign to create, and what she came up with were cascades of buds like seashells on a string, their matte platinum petals forming protective bell-like pods around pearls. On the opposite end of the spectrum were ornaments as lively and bold as a burst of chyrsanthemums or fireworks.
Honolulu's jewelry fans got a peek at the geisha jewelry last weekend when Renzi, visiting from New York, showed pieces from the film during a trunk show at Neiman Marcus, which carries Me & Ro creations in its fine-jewelry department.
The hair ornament will be seen in the film when it opens in December. Me & Ro jewelry starts at about $100 at Neiman Marcus.
"My grandmother said that when I was a baby, she'd take off her diamond rings and leave me with them in the living room and I'd be very quiet and very happy.
"I've always loved jewelry. My grandmother and mother both had lots of jewelry, and in my Italian family, every holiday you got jewelry. If you were a newborn, you got jewelry."
Renzi started designing hoop earrings, bangle bracelets and necklaces as a teen, and an exercise in learning to solder won her a prize in an arts-and-crafts competition for a bracelet that ended up being stolen from a contest display.
"My teacher said I should take it as a compliment, but at the time it didn't feel like it. That bracelet took three months to make."
She continued to design even while pursuing a dance degree at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where craft facilities were open 24 hours a day. "You could blow glass, do ceramics. I just kept making jewelry. I'm pretty much self-taught."
After getting her fill of dance, Renzi started Me & Ro with Quan in 1991, and business took off after Julia Roberts wore their jewelry on "Notting Hill."
"We were doing OK but that speeded things up," Renzi said.
Even so, she's adamant about never losing sight of her roots. Renzi enjoys the primitive nature of shaping metal by hand, and while her work displays a tribal, organic sensibility, it also manages to be exacting and, in a word, perfect.
"Today, a lot of jewelry is mass-produced and it loses a certain quality that way. Our jewelry is not mass-produced and never will be," she said. "It's small, but it has a lot of detail. When something is simple the lines have to be better because if not, you can see all the flaws. People have said they don't want to work with us because our pieces are too demanding."
FALL'S HOLIDAY shoppers can look forward to seeing pieces set with Brazilian gemstones, including yellow beryl, aquamarines, and green and pink tourmalines.
"The quality of Brazilian stones is amazing," she said. "They have tourmalines that go from the palest to the darkest green."
Not restricted to just using silver, platinum and gold, Renzi might pair some of the stones with leather cord, which might shock the Ivanas of the world, but Renzi is accustomed to leading the pack.
"Years ago when I started using Chinese characters and Sanskrit, people were like, 'What's that?' Now they understand. Our jewelry allows people to be different," she said.
"We also layer a lot of jewelry, which I started doing because it's a very Middle America way of wearing jewelry. Women will wear a necklace their husband gave them, with another necklace with the names of their kids.
"Our style is very organic, very wearable and very casual. You're not showing how much you own, because that's not fashion. Fashion today is about the subtle beauty of things, understated beauty. I like that."
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