All posts tagged: jewelry

Why Whimsical Heists Are Taking Over Your Feed

Why Whimsical Heists Are Taking Over Your Feed

March, 2026: They (allegedly) stole your (luxury designer) wallet in El Segundo Is the Bling Ring alive and well in the LA country suburb of El Segundo? While that crew of teen thieves is out of the game, they’ve spawned their fair share of imitators. Suspects arrested last month in Southern California allegedly lifted at least $6 million in luxury goods, including “over 100 designer handbags (Hermès Birkin, Louis Vuitton, Chanel), 22 high-end timepieces (Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Rolex), gold coins, jewelry, 20 firearms, and over $800,000 in cash,” El Segundo police say via statement. In addition to the bags and watches, police say they found collectable cards and firearms in his possession, photos of which the agency has shared. The alleged thieves were tracked to a home in Temecula following a January 10 burglary in which $600,000 worth of “designer handbags and jewelry” went missing. Police are currently seeking other victims of what they say is “an organized residential burglary crew operating across multiple jurisdictions,” including LA and San Diego counties. If you’re a …

Salvador Dalí’s Surreal Jewelry Designs: From Throbbing Heart Necklaces to Medusa Brooches

Salvador Dalí’s Surreal Jewelry Designs: From Throbbing Heart Necklaces to Medusa Brooches

Upon hear­ing the name of Sal­vador Dalí, even a total lay­man in the art world is bound to get visions of melt­ing clocks. Sur­pris­ing­ly, for an artist who showed so much self-mar­ket­ing savvy, Dalí nev­er brought an actu­al time­piece in that dis­tinc­tive­ly, even canon­i­cal­ly sur­re­al shape to mar­ket. But that hard­ly stopped Carti­er from putting out the Crash, whose dis­tort­ed shape may have always brought The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry to mind, but whose name hints at the inspi­ra­tion of a watch smashed up in a car wreck. The Crash came out in swing­ing-six­ties Lon­don at its very height, by which time Dalí him­self had been design­ing real jew­el­ry for more than a quar­ter cen­tu­ry. ?si=v8xd7w6Tr3ZQzIIq You can see a few of Dalí’s jew­els in the 1960 British Pathé clip at the top of the post. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, they occu­py a realm apart from, or at least orthog­o­nal to, that of con­ven­tion­al jew­el­ry. Some of them move: Liv­ing Flower, for instance, which “opens to reveal sta­men and petals paved with dia­monds. The mech­a­nism is embed­ded in mala­chite from the …

On inheriting your grandmother’s jewelry and reinventing style

On inheriting your grandmother’s jewelry and reinventing style

The first time I saw the watch was not in real life but in a painting, a self-portrait. In it, my grandmother wears a crisp white blouse, collar popped up, tucked into a matching full skirt. She’s standing in front of a marble fireplace decked with ivy. Her face is in three-quarter profile, and she’s wearing her cat-eye eyeglasses. Her arms are crossed and one of her pinkie fingers is slightly raised. The effect is somewhat regal; I imagine this was intentional. She’s wearing several pieces of jewelry in the image, all of them small, all of them gold. At the center of the canvas, right where her arms are crossed, is the watch. I think this placement was intentional too. I never thought about the watch again until one day I realized it was in my possession. I can’t remember if she gave it to me or if I received it after she died. I look at it now — it’s sitting on my desk as I write. It casts an odd kind of …