JEWELS THAT SIT WELL

Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarizing, misquoting and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever?" So said Dylan Thomas of the poet and eccentric Edith Sitwell who was famous, no doubt, but obviously not popular with everyone. She was definitely a splendid icon of her day and like many of the most impressive of icons was unknowable in age and encrusted in gems. From her earliest years, she was deeply aware of her curious apartness from the ordinary world. She wrote of herself in an autobiography, " I have my own particular elegance, but I am as stylized as the music of Debussy or Ravel." She never followed the fashion of her day, of course, declaring that " the trouble with English women is that they dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation, not wanting to attract attention." And attract, Edith did. Secure in her position as the grande dame of English letters, she had wrapped herself in her own mythology like some ancient barbaric empress. Who can ever forget her in those medieval-looking and baroque jewels; those massive necklaces or rather, breast-plates, often by Fulco di Verdura and shaped like primitive carapaces acting as shields against her critics and other lesser mortals whom she often derided as "impertinent." Humongous rings, always in multiples, became an essential adjunct of her always highly cultivated image, emphasizing the almost gothic beauty of her long-fingered and exquisitely manicured hands, which she indulged in with a perverse vanity. She remarked of herself once, "My hands are my face". At her landmark presentation, "Façade," on the other hand, it was her voice that became her face as she hid behind a giant canvas on stage with only a megaphone peeping out to declaim her poetry accompanied by the dazzling score of William Walton.

Given to wearing velvet robes and brocades, her appearance could only be described as magisterial, what with her six foot frame, her angular, aristocratic profile, not to mention her grandiose gestures and phrases. For a public debate in the ’20s with Alfred Noyes, a respected poet of the old guard, Edith representing the modernists, wore a purple robe and gold laurel wreath on her head, contrasting clashingly with Noyes’ sober American suit and horn-rimmed spectacles. The contrast was so appropriate, with her dress addressing the issue. She never dressed just for the sake of being eccentric as a poseur would do. Always remaining true to herself, she used unusual clothes and jewelry as a means to express herself. If she was interested in odd things, she used them for self-expression or as subjects for amused reflection just because they pleased her. The public, of course, just saw the eccentricity, of which Edith remarked. "If I wear ordinary clothes, I fear that it would make young persons doubt the existence of the Deity".

A deity, in fact, she was. Edith as well as her equally famous brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, exerted such a profound influence on younger persons who looked to them as gods of style and taste. Writers all, the Sitwells were the gifted children of the eccentric Sir George and Lady Ida Sitwell of Derbyshire. As poet and critic, Edith was a proponent and supporter of innovative trends in English poetry from 1916 to 1921, and opposed what she considered the conventionalism of many contemporary backward-looking poets. Sacheverell wrote a book, Southern Baroque Art which electrified the whole of his generation, exposing them to an architecture and style of decoration that had been dismissed for years by the arbiters of safe and timid Good Taste. Osbert, the eldest, was a distinguished connoisseur and collector, as well as a discerning patron of young and avant-garde artists. The Sitwell siblings were widely hailed as leaders and arbiters of a new and provocatively exciting movement in the cultural world. Their love of extraordinary and bizarre objects of all dates from ancient to Victorian, their patronage of the "new," and of the effect to be gained by mixing such ingredients into an eclecticism that recaptured all-but-forgotten whimsicality, had gradually brought about a significant shift in taste, collecting and decorating which defined the modern era.

This ebullient joie-de-vivre, a love of the unusual and stylish and a wholehearted embracing of fantasy and excess are qualities which Rigaux embodies today in jewelry that is definitely not for the faint of heart. Working from their atelier in Paris, Rigaux handcrafts bold pieces in bronze, silver and pewter, using unusual materials with interesting textures like fossils, wood, Japanese porcelain and vintage glass. The pieces are virtual sculptures which recall the primitive and the medieval as well as the Art Deco era of the Sitwells. But all original and definitely contemporary. Edith would definitely approve.

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Rigaux Jewelry is available at FIRMA G/F Greenbelt 3, Ayala Center, Makati telephone 757-4009 firma2@vasia.com.