The ongo­ing expan­sion of Jewelhistory.com is march­ing along. Well…not exactly march­ing, more like strolling. I’m delib­er­ately tak­ing time to think through each and every shift of pur­pose and sub­se­quent con­se­quence. Mea­sure twice, and cut once…right?

Today is the begin­ning of a new cat­e­gory of posts that will fea­ture the voices of col­leagues who I have asked to share their unique per­spec­tives with you. I’m work­ing to make this a reg­u­lar fea­ture on the blog. Their sto­ries demon­strate that the jew­eled arts endorse and sup­port the many, var­ied tal­ents of our cul­ture. Adorn­ment cap­tures light and illu­mi­nates our world view of peo­ple, places, and ideologies.

Today’s post is by co-owner of LupRocks, Michelle Orman. Her firm helps to con­nect lead­ing jew­elry, fash­ion, and dec­o­ra­tive arts design­ers to the world of tele­vi­sion and film. Michelle inter­viewed Bride Wars cos­tume designer, Karen Patch, about the process of dress­ing and bejew­el­ing Kate Hud­son and Anne Hath­away for the movie:

Anne Hath­away and Kate Hud­son in Bride Wars

M.O. Karen pulled jew­elry for the film through LupRocks.com so I was anx­ious to learn about the over­all process of dress­ing a star cast:

M.O. In “Bride Wars” the char­ac­ters really do a num­ber on one another to try to ruin the other one’s wed­ding! How did that fig­ure into your choices?

K.P. I worked with Vera Wang on the dresses, and I really had to work back­wards from how they looked destroyed to how they looked in the beginning.

M.O. How do you source out the wardrobes for your casts? Do you attend fash­ion shows, read lots of mag­a­zines, do lots of per­sonal shopping?

K.P. (laughs) Yes to all of those things. I’m in show­rooms, and I go to retail stores, and I read tons of mag­a­zines, and I just know what’s out there so I can nar­row it down to, say, the Dolce looks good, the Hugo Boss looks good, Marc Jacobs looks good, Chan­nel looks good, Philip Lim blouses look good this sea­son. For jew­elry, I will always go to LupRocks.com first. If I can work with small places and emerg­ing design­ers I def­i­nitely do. If that com­pany is excited about work­ing with the par­tic­u­lar actor, it makes life eas­ier. And every­body wants to work with Kate Hud­son and Anne Hath­away so that’s kind of ideal. They are both beau­ti­ful and young and at the top of their games and every­thing they wear is going to be seen and exam­ined and copied.

M.O. What are some of your con­sid­er­a­tions when choos­ing the jewelry?

With jew­elry it’s a lot more per­sonal. I’ll put every­thing I’ve selected as options for them on trays and we’ll sit down and look at the jew­elry together. For each cos­tume, they have their jew­elry tray with the jew­elry that’s cho­sen for the entire film, and the tray goes into the room with the cos­tumes and they will pick off the tray. In effect, they have their own jew­elry box, and just like you prob­a­bly do each morn­ing, they tend to grav­i­tate towards the same pieces.

M.O. So at the end of the day, are you happy with how the film turned out?

K.P. Yes, I’m very happy with how it looks. It looks kind of rich in a way but at the same time, it looks believable.