Glittering Victorian Diamonds at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party

The Academy Awards were more than a week ago, but I’ve still got another sparkling moment for us to enjoy from the evening: a special Victorian-era necklace worn for the Vanity Fair Oscars Party.

On March 10, actress Leslie Mann and her husband, director Judd Apatow, arrived at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles for the annual Vanity Fair Oscars Party. The magazine has been hosting the glamorous party after the Academy Awards ceremony for 30 years.

Mann wore a black and white dress from Givenchy for the party. She added major sparkle to the sleek ensemble with two significant pieces of diamond jewelry.

The show-stopping piece from the outfit was Mann’s necklace. The piece is a sparkling diamond fringe that dates to the Victorian era.

The necklace was made using metal collets to give the diamonds at the end of each fringe a supersized, graduated look, a common nineteenth-century design technique.

Who Wore What Jewels reported that Mann and her stylist, Jamie Mizrahi, borrowed the diamonds for her Oscars party look from Briony Raymond New York. The fine jewelry atelier creates new bespoke pieces for their clientele, but they also deal in estate jewelry. The diamond fringe necklace belongs to the second category. The necklace is currently available for purchase on the company’s website, retailing for $98,000. Few details about the piece are available there beyond its stated nineteenth-century creation date.

Here’s another look at the way that Mann and her team styled the necklace for the party. I’m not sure about the combination of the fringe necklace and the neckline of the gown–in some photographs I think they compete a bit for attention instead of complementing each other. What do all of you think?

Oh, and PS: there was one more piece of diamond jewelry incorporated into Mann’s look, too. She wore a gorgeous diamond lattice bracelet on her right wrist. I don’t think it’s on the Briony Raymond website currently, but I’d imagine it was also sourced from them.

Overall, I’m just thrilled to see significant antique jewelry any time it appears on a Hollywood red carpet, even if it is on loan temporarily. Jewels are meant to be worn, and it’s fun to see pieces that are more than a century old still sparkling!