Celebrity Jeweler to The Stars

The Most Expensive Diamond Dress Ever Made

2008-10-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Chris Aire's Spring Collection on display at Fashion Week in 2007 including his Diamond Dress and Diamond and Red Gold Fashion. Visit chrisaire.com for more info.

Chris Aire Bling

2008-04-24T17:53:00.000-07:00

Chris Dorsey was 15 years old and very very high when he wondered to himself what noise a ray of light would make when it hit a diamond and popped out. Bling-bling came the answer, and the New Orleans rapper known as Baby Gangsta had a monster hit on his hands.

And a term he wishes he’d patented. Entering the Oxford English Dictionary five years later as “official” slang, bling is the buzzword everyone from Cadillac to Sprint to Mideast knock-off artists turn to when they need to “keep it real.” Like everything street, it became a cartoon of itself. Literally: Bling, debuting in X-Men #171, has superpowers of crystalline hardness and her ability to shoot diamond shards. Knocked-off, trivialized, oversized, and supersized, can Bling still mean a thing to anyone listening to his heart?

It can if you’re the man who gave bling its look, its shape, content. Its meaning. In all but a master’s hands, bling easily becomes garish, overstated, vulgar. It took a master like Chris Aire, designing for the biggest athletes of the day, to hit the note, and find the meaning. Clients from Shaquille O’Neal to Serena Williams didn’t want large jewelry just to fit their oversize bodies. As would entertainers from Eminem and Will Smith to Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry, they wanted jewelry that made a large statement. And it had to be personal. It could be as simple and clean as the five-carat flawless stud in Gary Patyon’s ear, the Dog Tags on Will Smith’s chest, or as complex as the blinged-out pink-diamond Traveller on TK’s wrist.or the TK-carat, TK-weight crucifix necklace Allen Iverson sported on the April 23, 2001 Sports Illustrated cover.

Every pendant, bracelet, stud, watch, engagement ring the Iceman has designed in the past decade has been knocked off and sold by weight. But one thing never changes: “Everyone tries to steal the next man’s thoughts,” as the rapper Nelly put it so well. “But this dude’s different. His stuff’s so personal and so strong you could put it in a museum.”

Chris Aire Jewelry

Aire Diamonds

2008-04-24T17:44:00.000-07:00

Do you watch ESPN? The NBA? MLB, or the NFL on Sundays? Are you a red-carpet junkie: an Oscar fan? The Emmys? Or are the Grammys more your speed—watching Eminem and 50 Cent strut their stuff?

What will you see on every one of these shows? A Chris Aire diamond. For the Iceman is the jeweler taht athletes, actors, and rappers turn to when bling is the thing. And whether it’s that five-carat stud in Vince Carter’s ear, the tennis bracelet on Serena Williams’s wrist at the U.S. Open, the Opera Necklace adorning Allen Iverson’s tattooed chest on his Sports Illustrated cover, the oversize Swiss-made watch on the wrist of every third celebrity stepping up to a mic, Bling-bling comes down to one word: Diamond.

For 500 years, diamond has been the most expensive, sought-after jewel on the planet. And not because of the considerable hype. This billion-year-old stone, forged in volcanoes in the Earth’s most remote corners, has properties that make it unique: its hardness, its ability to capture and transform light, its universal symbolism.

But above all: its beauty.

Forget the Four Cs. Forget the certificates jewelers and websites tell you to look at. Forget the hype. And forget whatever "outside" reason led you to shop for a diamond: I’m getting engaged. I want to accessorize with jewelry. I need to get myself out of this doghouse, yesterday. I want my watch to be the $hit!

Drop all that noise. You’re in the presence of beauty … so open your eyes! Learn what the Iceman spent two decades learning: Like the ballers, rappers, and artists wearing them, diamonds must perform. Every day. Every night. Without fail.

Diamonds are whatever you and I, and maybe De Beers, say they are. Diamonds, however, do three things. They sparkle. They shine. And they fire off colors. The crucial thing to consider when looking at diamonds is which of these three performance aspects moves you—or your beloved. It’s very, very personal.

Sparkle: Gemologists call it scintillation, and for centuries, diamond cutters have devised ways of creating additional glitter for their creations. Scintillation occurs when any two facets (cuts) on the pavilion (or bottom) of the stone act as mirrors. A lightray entering the crown (top) of the diamond is bounced at a right angle from one facet to its perfectly placed counterpart on the other side of the pavilion, then transmitted back up at a 45% angle out through the crown, where the eye sees it as a stab of light. Bounced off as many as 36 pairs of facets, these stabs are sparkle. They occur in a typical movement of a woman’s hand—say—as it turns ever so slightly and the diamond in her ring glitters. It’s important to note the emotional effect this has upon you. Scintillation is a diamond’s most eye-catching property. Scintillation screams. Scintillation amuses. It hypnotizes.

Shine. The trade calls it brilliance, the return of white light. Before the invention of "brillianteering," the modern way of adding facets, diamonds were less valuable than rubies, emeralds, even sapphires. Today, it’s the property most synonymous with these expensive gems: They glow. It happens in two ways: external and internal, the second of which we call lustre. External, the less important of the two, but still crucial, is a result of the final polishing a diamond is given. Light hits the outside of a facet and bounces off—much as it would a mirror or a polished piece of metal. Lustre results from optimal facet placement, allowing the full spectrum of a lightwave to emerge. A complex function of wavelengths and molecular temperatures, and the study of mathematicians and cutters for centuries, it’s what gives diamond the warmth that no other gem remotely approximates. Brilliance captivates. It seduces. It whispers: wealth.

Fire. The most magical of diamond’s attributes, these colored flashes are an effect related to what scientists call dispersion: white light broken up by a prism into its seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. In a diamond the crown acts as the prism, but fire begins deep inside the stone, and is a function of how facets are cut and of the diamond’s hardness. A well-polished stone "fires" in a way no other substance can. At times a full rainbow—similar to the Pink Floyd album cover—at others, a flare of blue, at others a lingering orange, it happens differently in every lighting (candlelight will often cause diamond to fire, office light almost never will) and in every stone. But every time it does, every time, your jaw drops. Fire fascinates. Fire mystifies. Fire keeps you looking at your diamond for decades.

Bear in mind that certain cuts accentuate different qualities. Princess cuts create tremendous scintillation, but little lustre. Emerald cuts offer little fire but great lustre. And never buy a diamond standing at a counter, where of course the jeweler has created optimal lighting conditions you’ll rarely encounter elsewhere. If he’ll allow it, take it outside, to a window, to a poorly lit corner. Put the diamond in one hand, cover it with the other, then open your top hand to let light in, a little at a time. Remember: you’re going to be wearing this diamond. How does it pick up your skin color? How does it behave with the colors you generally wear. If you buy it loose, request that your diamond be placed, for showing, in something close to its eventual setting.

Above all, ask yourself: How does this diamond make me feel? Happy shopping.

Chris Aire: Red Gold Jewelry

2008-04-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

Chris Aire is Old School, and OG - one of the founding fathers of bling, the dog tag, the Opera Necklace, the oversize Swiss-made watch encrusted in pink diamonds, the man who blinged out the ears, wrists, necks and fingers of a Hall of Fame’s worth of NBA, NFL, MLB legends. Surely that’s how he’ll be remembered?

Hell no.

Ask anyone lucky enough to have sat next to the likes of L’il Kim, Foxy Brown, and Mos Def as supermodel Alek Wek hit the catwalk of New York’s FashionWeek 2006 in Aire’s $50,000,000 Red-Gold Feng Shui Empress Gown. The full-length gown dripped with 3713 diamonds, but you barely saw them: What caught the eye was the primeval beauty of the Sudanese-born beauty’s skin—all bronze and copper—against the Red-Gold fabric of the homemade gown. “If you could sweat pure gold,” the widely followed blog beautyaddict.com wrote, “this is what you’d look like after an hour in the sun.” Then you realized: A sizeable fraction of the audience sported Red-Gold: everything from Aire Travelers to the Iceman’s wedding bands, diamond rings, Signature Tri-Tags in diamonds in Red-Gold ...

Don’t be fooled by the legion of Red-Gold imitators and knock-off artists already jumping on the red bandwagon. Wanna-bes and knock-off artists have discounted Aire’s priceless creations for a decade, but to no avail this time: The proprietary admixture of copper and gold is not about price. Retailing for as little as $200, Red-Gold is where fashion jewelry meets the Gap. It’s about a metal that is giving our multi-cultural world its look: natural, elegant and deep, on the red carpet, against skin tones as widely varied as Clint Eastwood and 50 Cent’s, draped on beauties from Angelina Jolie to Halle Berry.

Launching to the full market with Spring ’07’s “Red Hot, Red Gold” campaign, the newest, most precious metal will be featured at select Bailey Banks & Biddle doors.