Kenneth Jay Lane, the designer and bon vivant who built a global business from glittering acts of unabashed deception, producing fake and junk jewelry — or, as he liked to say, tongue in cheek, “faque” and “junque” — has died at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
Chris Sheppard, the executive vice president of Lane’s company, said Thursday that Lane had died overnight in his sleep. No cause was given.
“I myself am a fabulous fake,” Lane once said. The son of an automotive parts supplier from Detroit — or “Day-twah,” as he would pronounce it with a wink — he was indeed one of his own most striking creations.
He came to be regarded as the first American jewelry designer to make it not only acceptable but also chic to wear fake jewelry, and in reaching that plateau, he transformed himself into a high-society, jet-setting businessman with a lifestyle that was anything but cheap.
Darkly handsome in his glory years, always suave and impeccably tailored, an amusing and witty man who frequently poked fun at himself, Lane unapologetically wanted the best of everything — from the luxurious duplex apartment in a Stanford White mansion on Park Avenue to a coveted place on the “A” guest lists for all the best parties everywhere, be they in the United States, England, France, Italy or Spain. The occasional blowout soiree in Morocco or Egypt also had him on a jet.
It was a persona that began forming when he fell in love with fashion as a boy; he once took an after-school job just so he could buy a camel’s hair coat, and when he had earned the equivalent of the price tag, he quit.
Soon, still a teenager, he left Detroit, bent on a design career, and found his way to New York. To his languid Midwestern voice he soon added a slightly British overtone, acquired at the same time that he discovered British tailors, to whom he was devoted the rest of his life.
The wider public knew him from his frequent appearances on QVC, the home shopping network, where his company made a fortune in sales. He often gave viewers a glimpse of his glamorous world and advised them how to wear the ornaments he peddled.
Many women wore his designs with their real jewels. Even experts were hard put to tell one from the other. Coco Chanel had accomplished the same dynamic some years earlier, but her fakes were meant for a more limited, well-heeled market and, unlike Lane’s, had little mass distribution.
Lane was self-deprecatingly realistic about his designing talent. “My designs are all original,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “Original from someone.”
He believed, however, that much of good design was what he called editorial — choosing the right ideas and applying them practically. He “drew inspiration,” he said, from all over: the work of celebrated designers like Fulco di Verdura, Jean Schlumberger and David Webb; the museums of the world; the crown jewelry of British and European royalty and of Indian maharanis; and the cornucopia of ethnic pieces found in markets around the world.
“I think it’s called ‘having the eye,’” he told The Times in 1993. “It isn’t necessarily reinventing the wheel.”
His name became so synonymous with fake jewelry that it was even evoked, unflatteringly, in the Lou Reed song “Sally Can’t Dance,” about a New York fashion model’s rise and fall.
He was noted for his imaginative and unusual color combinations — amethyst and coral, amber and turquoise, sapphire and topaz. Early in his career he came up with such innovations as embroidered earrings, or earrings of peacock feathers and iridescent beetle bodies. Later, when he was a byword among both the moneyed class and the mass market, some of his customers had his “faux masterpieces,” as he called them, incorporated into the real thing.
Lane’s customers and friends throughout the years included some of the world’s richest, most publicized and most fashionable women — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, Nancy Reagan, the princesses Margaret and Diana, Babe Paley and Diana Vreeland among them.
Through many of them, Lane became one of the most in-demand escorts of single and married women — wives whose husbands refused to accompany them to some of the sparkling parties they enjoyed. He denied, however — indignantly — that he was a “walker.”
If anything, he said to The Times in 1993, “I’m a runner,” then added more seriously: “I’m a single man, and there are single women, and we balance. Walkers are people who have nothing to do; they just escort women to dinners and parties. I have a business.”
Lane was born in Detroit on April 22, 1932, and graduated from Detroit Central High School. A budding interest in design led him to the University of Michigan, where he briefly studied architecture before moving on to the Rhode Island School of Design, from which he graduated in 1954. He set his sights on New York, where designers, he once said, “were treated like celebrities.”
A stint in the art department at Vogue magazine was less than successful. “I’d spill the rubber cement, I’d spill the ink pot, or I’d cut my finger and ruin the layout,” he recalled.
A documentary film about him, called “Fabulously Fake: The Real Life of Kenneth Jay Lane,” is expected to be released in 2018.
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