Can it really be? The great tastemaker John Loring saying that “sophistication” will not be found on America’s “Style Menu” when we wake up to the new millennium?
This from the man who for the past 19 years has guided Tiffany & Co., the firm linked forever with elegance, style and the good life, thanks in part to the famous image of Audrey Hepburn seated at a breakfast table, gracefully holding a footlong cigarette-holder and dripping pearls and diamonds.
” `Sophisticated’ used to be a positive term. In this day and age, it is a pejorative term,” says the design director, during a stop at Tiffany’s sparkling new location on the west side of Michigan Avenue. It was one of the few times during his recent four-day visit to Chicago that the 58-year-old designer and author was not speaking to a huge gathering and leaving delightful tales about multimillion-dollar brooches and society’s grandest dames in his wake.
Sophistication, Loring says , is based on what other people tell us it is, on pedigrees that have been inherited with no stamp of their benefactors.
That is not what Americans want today. Gradually over the course of the 20th Century, American design “has learned not to be `sophisticated,’ ” What we want are things natural, simple and, most importantly, our own, Loring says.
“We don’t need all these social, historical, financial references and pedigrees. We are not living in the 18th or 19th Centuries,” he says. “I think that is where we’re going . . . shedding the idea that it wasn’t any good and no one had any taste if it wasn’t Louis Something and looked like it came out of a hotel lobby.”
What we want today–and tomorrow–are are simple surfaces, perfection of forms and designs inspired by nature, Loring says.
Alter the natural form a bit, abstract it a little, then stop.
You can see this vision in the sensuous pitchers and jewelry designed by Elsa Peretti for Tiffany.
“Whether a silver cuff bracelet design (by Peretti) is based on a bone or the flow of liquids, it all goes back to complete basics. . . . You have to design something based on what the whole human race has in common. The moment you do something regional or national or from your own group, you won’t be successful,” says Loring, who has been described by Michael Wolleager, executive director of Architectural Digest magazine, as having “an incomparable sense of quality and style.”
That’s certainly what one would expect of a design director who is not only lord of the rings, necklaces and bracelets, but of china, crystal, personal and home accessories, too, responsible for maintaining Tiffany standards of design in all of these product categories.
Man of many talents
When not traveling around the world as Tiffany’s spokesman, Loring also designs products, such as the Atlas line of men’s timepieces and the “most extravagant” diamond brooch Tiffany made in the 20th Century, priced at $15 million.
He is also a talent-spotter. It was Loring who introduced Paloma Picasso, daughter of one of the century’s greatest artist, to Tiffany. They met in Italy when she was 16; he was the 26-year-old “Merchant of Venice,” owner of one of the first five Yves St. Laurent stores in the world.
Another way Loring exerts his influence as the arbiter of taste is by authoring decorative arts and design books. His seventh, “Tiffany’s 20th Century, A Portrait of American Style” (Abrams, $60), last fall. The cover is the instantly recognizable photo of Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the 1961 movie that ensured the masses identified Tiffany as an icon of the good life.
Though it features 350 photos–many by the world’s greatest photographers–of of jewelry, home accessories and other “fancy articles,” Loring’s latest has a lot more to offer than just good looks. Beginning with the “anything goes” late 1890s and closing with the curiosity for what the 21st Century will bring, Loring traces Tiffany’s influence on American style, and how it made American style “the dominant style of the 20th Century.”
Loring, only the third design director in the firm’s history, writes that his predecessor, Van Day Truex (who held the post from 1956 to 1979; it had been vacant since the 1933 death of Louis Comfort Tiffany) was already leading the firm away from “sophistication” and toward simplicity by basing Tiffany objects on common everyday articles.
As an example, his vermeiled sterling-silver Strawberry Box was an exact replica of throwaway wooden boxes used for selling berries in grocery stores.
“Louis Comfort Tiffany was not such a back-to-basics man,” says Loring, who adds that the challenge of being an arbiter of taste for almost 20 years has been staying on the mark.
To do that, it has helped that Loring had lived in enough countries and been exposed to “enough things to know what works in people’s lives.”
The right hands
That exposure includes a stint as the New York bureau chief of Architectural Digest, which immediately preceded his post at Tiffany. “It took seven years of training by (editor-in-chief) Paige Rense to cut away the sophistication,” Loring says.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did her bit, too, as editor of Loring’s first six Tiffany books. “Oh, John, all these adjectives,” he recalls her exclaiming as she wielded her blue pencil, whittling away the superfluous.
“My life has been an absolute miracle of being put in the right hands,” Loring says of his mentors, which earlier included Yves St. Laurent and art patron Peggy Guggenheim.
“People took him under their wings when he was young and lived in Europe,” says Rense, who calls Loring “a walking compendium of interior design and the decorative arts.” But Rense adds, “They weren’t mentoring him because he was boring or needy.”
And in the end, it was Loring’s excellent eye, creative spirit and unparalleled discernment, as society columnist Aileen “Suzy” Mehle puts it, that made Loring “the ideal tastemaker for our times.”
So what are Loring’s rules for developing one’s own taste?
“Banish anything that smacks of pretension or wallows in nostalgia, and you will never make a mistake. Stick to your instincts. Ask: Is this life-enhancing and does it bring us pleasure?”
Along the way, a lot of people get misled by being too strongly influenced by others and the past.
“I think what people call bad taste comes from the cultural irrelevance of things–they just don’t fit in our lives,” Loring says. “If taste is good for something, it is for living in the present.”