Last Monday night was the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) Awards in New York City. The awards honor the very best in fashion design: womenswear, menswear and accessories.

Amongst the winners, including Marc Jacobs for womenswear Designer of the Year, David Neville & Marcus Wainwright of  Rag & Bone for menswear Designers of the Year and Michael Kors for Lifetime Achievement, was Mr. Alexis Bittar , who took home the Accessory Designer of the Year Award.

This post is about him.

My mother is actually the true fan of Mr. Bittar and her personal collection of colorful Lucite bracelets is showcased below. She also has long been a fan of Bakelite and I am thinking her love and admiration for Bittar’s pieces stems from that.

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Bittar started his career in fashion by selling vintage clothing and jewelry in the East Village in 1983. This introduced him to Bakelite jewelry. He was “impressed by how people really valued the fact that it had been hand carved.” The idea for his business started here.

 “I was in a store and came up with the idea of fusing the styles of Lalique glass with Bakelite, and using Lucite. It was just a thought, but I followed it through and started carving it by hand in my bedroom.”

 He sold these early bedroom-made pieces on the street in Soho and slowly built an empire of carved Lucite jewelry, starting with bangles and then expanding to earrings, necklaces and rings.

Today, Bittar runs his entire company out of a studio/small-scale factory in Brooklyn. He carves all of the prototypes himself for each collection. His runs of merchandise are then produced by hand by his small team of workers, who carve the jewelry out of large blocks of Lucite. They then hand-paint the pieces and manually apply all of the crystals and jewels. A surprisingly labor-intensive process for each piece, a true special novelty in this world we live in today.

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array of  A. Bittar earrings

Bittar creating prototypes in his studio

my mother was lucky enough to meet Mr. Bittar at a trunk show and have him sign her gold bangle and jewelry bag

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after he won his CFDA award last week, with Dakota Fanning, who presented him with the award

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I not only admire Bittar’s work (and hope to inherit my mother’s collection someday), but I also admire his manifesto. He had a vision and made it happen for himself. He is also able to run and manage a company that is able to balance art and creative vision with financial success. Not an easy task.

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“You can’t be afraid of hard work. Most people are obsessed with being famous because that is what our culture is obsessed with – but no one wants to put in the time to master a skill. There is this sense of entitlement where we think things should be given to us, or we are just waiting to be ‘discovered.’ That’s bullshit! The sooner you realize that only you and your hard work can make your career happen, the sooner you will accomplish it.”

Touché, my friend.

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