what's in a name ?

Fancy a pave donut? How about a holly-go-lightly, or a hoop-dee-do ? One question my jewelry customers have is "where do you come up with the names?". Well, believe it or not, designing and making jewelry is hard work, but picking the names is the fun part. A lot of the names have meanings, the 'hoop dee do' refers to my mom, dorothy. Everyone around here knew her as dee, so it was a natural to get this name. If you look carefully at robertachiarella.com, you'll learn the names of my dogs, knicknames for some of the men in our lives, and which earring was designed at breakfast time.

But, sometimes things go in the other direction- one of the best-sellers in my line is the 'super sarah' which we named for sarah jessica parker. Her stylists requested samples of my jewelry for her, and they told me what she liked and what she actually wore. So, the super sarah's you see on my site got their name because she wore them. This is a photo of her wearing them, from a japanese website.

Now, we have introduced the gg xoxo necklace as a tribute to 'gossip girl' star, taylor momsen.

I watch Gossip Girl, and follow the blogs and various posts with great interest. We all have special feelings about the TV-show-next-door, they actually do a lot of the filming right here in my neighborhood. The ice-cream shop, the steps of the school, and the front door of the church (she goes to church !!) are places I walk by all the time. When they were filming some exterior shots earlier in the year, I walked the dogs about 16 times a day, to see who I could see and check out the action.

I'd read in teen vogue that Taylor Momsen doesn't have a stylist and usually does her own wardrobe, but I can't say I fully believed it. That is, until she walked into Henri Bendel and bought some jewelry. She even paid for it with her own credit card. She wore it on the show, and the wardrobe department came back to buy another necklace when they had to re-shoot a scene, it was Taylor's necklace so she had taken it home! You can tell she really liked wearing it around, more than a few people have sent me photos of 'jenny humphrey' wearing my bracelet and my necklace for photo shoots, at interviews, and on TV. So, once again we reversed the naming ritual and christened the necklace that taylor purchased the "gg xoxo". I'm not sure she knows I named it for her (or her show), but maybe she'll find out. Ciao !

nobody knows her identity, but I know her stylists

Who wants to read another blog about the financial crisis, or watch our politicians carrying on, it's so depressing. We are all lucky to live in a country that has the resources, although mismanaged, to help us in a crisis. I hope and pray that is what will happen, these folks in high finance and in washington got us all into quite a mess, and they should do their jobs and approve plans to get us out.
And while they are doing that, we are anxiously awaiting the on-air shot of my necklace on the gossip girl.
It's a real drama, and I was not a big fan the first season, but this year I have to say I am sort-of into it, sometimes for the story and other times just for the scenery. I live where Serena van der Woodsen lives, and when we sit around watching the show, we love that Serena and her friends go where we go every day.

Of course, I've yet to see Serena, Nate Archibald or Dan Humphrey have lunch here! My father took us to hot dog stands for lunch when we were kids, told mom we dined at "joe's outdoor gardens". We can guess, as we listen to the omniscient yet unseen "Gossip Girl" (voiced by Kristen Bell) where they dine, but who knows, it's television. All I know is these folks all live for gossip and scandal, and in this neighborhood it really could be absolutey true.

The upper east side of manhattan is a mixture of new york's 'old money' families and their trust fund kids, and the rest of us, working families and professional people, gay straight and whatever. It's the part of town where 'the city never sleeps'. As you walk from the river towards fifth avenue, you get into the territory of the social register crowd, and the multi-multi millionaires. I'm not sure where our characters would live in real life, people like Dan and Jenny Humphrey probably live on my middle class block, but who knows, it's television. We have to figure that Serena, Eric and Blair live towards fifth avenue, where the grand old 'pre-war' apartment houses are filled with social register families whose ancestors go back to the mayflower.
New York was dutch before it was english, so to make the main character a "van der Woodsen" tells us this is old money indeed.

And it is certainly not a long shot for me to picture these characters running up and down these streets using their credit cards liberally in this neighborhood, as the fashion, shopping and partying is of the highest caliber. Of course, in real life you have to go downtown to find manhattan's trendiest hot spots, on TV it looks like the clubs are on the next block, but it isn't so! The nightlife in new york is amazing for sure, bars and clubs are open till 4 am, then there are the after-hours joints. But, the real hot spots are likely to be found in Vanessa's brooklyn neighborhood, an hour's subway ride away (it is quicker in a limo, though) but hey, this is television! At least the show is really shot here and not on a set in hollywood or toronto.

To get a better idea of their world, we walked around trying to find out from which balcony might come the gossip girl's blog, and tried to picture which store will be the source of the soon-to-be-notorious roberta chiarella jewelry.

In real life, the show's stylists went and purchased the jewelry at Henri Bendel, of course when we found out what it was for, a slightly deeper relationship developed.

We took this picture cause this was "Big's" church on sex in the city- is this a great neighborhood or what! When I spot my necklace on television, I'll let you know. BTW, if you want one, you can find it on my website. ciao!