Tanenbaum is keen to introduce the Schreiner oeuvre to a contemporary audience.ANGELA LEWIS
In all the years I've worked as a stylist with vintage-jewellery aficionado and retailer Carole Tanenbaum, it's hard to remember a moment when something in her treasure-trove showroom didn't thrill me. Instead, I recall being captivated by a collar-style necklace encrusted with crystal sea creatures, studying an abundance of quirky floral brooches to attempt – in vain – to choose just one to wear and discussing the designer names that we love most, including, in Tanenbaum's case, one particular label: Schreiner.
Henry Schreiner founded his company in 1932, and worked with houses such as Christian Dior and Norell to develop a reputation for unusual combinations of crystals and gems. Despite his bold aesthetic, not much is known about Schreiner, but Tanenbaum is changing that with her new book, Schreiner: Masters of Twentieth-Century Costume Jewelry.
"When I started collecting costume jewellery about 40 years ago, I was always gravitating to this one designer, who I felt was the designer – for imagination, for creativity, for wonderful construction," Tanenbaum says of the impetus behind her Schreiner collection, which includes 1,200 baubles. "Nobody knows where he came from, nobody knows what his ethics were, and there's a lot of news in this book that says it all."
The tome – created in collaboration with Eve Townsend, a graduate student who once worked on Tanenbaum's staff – unearths the tale of Terry, Henry Schreiner's daughter, and her husband Ambros Albert, who took the reins at the company in the 1950s after Henry passed away. "She was 25, in New York, and running this business after she lost her father," Townsend says. In a stroke of luck, when Townsend set out to see what she could find about the elusive designer, she happened upon an address that led to meeting Terry. The rendezvous was completely unexpected and was made even more interesting when you consider her choice of accessories that day. "You're wearing our jewellery," remarked a Schreiner family member. "That was a pretty crazy moment," she says.
The conversations Townsend had with Schreiner's family will undoubtedly thrill fans of "fabulous fakes," as Tanenbaum dubbed costume jewels and a 2005 photo book, which was her first foray into publishing. The phenomenon of the fortuitous chance encounter is, after all, at the heart of what makes vintage collecting so exciting.
"What I'm really interested in," says Townsend, "is connecting to the past – what these objects speak to: the people that made them, the people that wore them, the people that sold them. It's wonderful to wear a piece of history."
For her part, Tanenbaum is keen to introduce the Schreiner oeuvre to a contemporary audience.
"I started the business thinking that I would encourage people to collect," Tanenbaum says. "They don't know that these pieces exist – they don't know what to look for." Luckily, there are still those willing to do the hunting for us.
Schreiner: Masters of Twentieth-Century Costume Jewelry, $65 at bookstores. For more information, visit www.glitteratiincorporated.com.
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