Replica Jewelry Project

Liza Minnelli’s Jewelry from the film, New York, New York - Recreating the Rhinestone Brooch

Costume Design: Theadora Van Runkle

Every project has its challenges, some more then others. This particular project was difficult from the start.

All of the images we had of Liza Minnelli were either from a black and white contact sheet or made while viewing the film. She was always in motion. It was difficult to see the details in Ms Minnelli’s brooch. The brooch glittered while she danced throughout the song. After viewing the film clip, included below, we wondered if the brooch was not jewelry but was made of dress trimmings?

It was hard to tell… we decided for our purposes that we would recreate the brooch as costume jewelry.

Design Development

The key focus of this piece was the large center floral appearance of the brooch - we decided to look for a vintage piece rather than making it from scratch. We were able to locate several pieces of rhinestone costume jewelry that we could assemble to recreate this gem.

The tricky part about working with rhinestones is that the settings are made with base metals and not always the same type of metal. They can be difficult to solder together if not impossible. Base metal has a very low temperature and the rhinestones do not take to heat like genuine diamonds.

Etsy has become a great resource for materials.

We were able to find our rhinestone costume pieces on Etsy and was delighted to find the large floral brooch. It took two pairs of earrings and one brooch to build this replica design. Given the measurements and the components the next steps were to find the right combination of the jewels to recreate that “look” of the brooch seen in the film.

Fabrication

We selected Option A for our design. The dangle iridescent crystals were fairly easy to solder in place. To create supports and backplates for the brooch I used a sheet of nickel silver. Since we were not plating the brooch, nickel silver doesn't tarnish, if I used sterling silver that would evidently tarnish.

These supports and backplates gave us the need support to add all of the components to the floral brooch. Magnets were then attached to the back of the brooch.

Magnets are used to keep the brooch in place on the costume while not damaging the fabric.

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