By Victoria Gomelsky from New York Times
Gem X, a private jewelry social club, was started by two friends who “felt it would be fun to start planning our own events” that go inside the trade.
Even for its most ardent fans, the world of luxury jewelry can be awfully intimidating. Between the multimillion-dollar merchandise and the intense security — think gruff-looking guards, video surveillance and boutiques with double-locked doors — the industry has a well-deserved reputation for exclusivity.
Yet for members of Gem X, a private jewelry social club with chapters in New York and London (and soon, Los Angeles), privileged access to the trade’s most fabled people and places comes with the membership.
Founded in 2017 by two friends, Heidi Garnett and Lin Jamison, in New York, the club has about 600 members who pay $100 per year for the opportunity to attend two to three monthly events, including private tours of museum exhibitions, intimate talks with designers and lavish dinners where trays of gemstones are passed like candy dishes.
“We get to pull the curtain back from a jewelry house or a dealer, and usher the group into the inner sanctum,” said Levi Higgs, an archivist at the jeweler David Webb and a Gem X member since 2018.
The coronavirus pandemic forced the group to pause in-person gatherings, but instead of going into hibernation, Gem X was reborn online in late March with a series of Zoom-based jewelry talks, called Gemflix, that are free and open to everyone. (The organizers have encouraged donations to charities such as No Kid Hungry and the Equal Justice Initiative.)
About 5,000 people from more than 20 countries have joined the Gemflix mailing list, with hundreds tuning in once or twice a week to hear from a spectrum of jewelry experts, including miners, gem cutters, auction house specialists, dealers, museum curators and designers.
The list of archived episodes — free to members and now available to nonmembers for a $10 monthly subscription — reads like a curriculum for a master’s program in jewelry. A sampling includes a live demonstration of the granulation technique created by the Los Angeles-based designer Loren N. Teetelli for her Loren Nicole brand; a peek inside the gem collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History with its curator, Dr. Jeffrey E. Post; a healing session with “The Crystal Workshop” author Azalea Lee; a chat about culture and creativity with Christian Hemmerle of the Munich-based jewelry house Hemmerle; and a talk by Maria Maclennan of Scotland, a researcher in forensic jewelry, on how she uses jewelry to aid criminal investigations.
The virtual gatherings, much like the club’s live events, are rooted in the notion that “jewelry is the perfect vehicle for storytelling,” Ms. Jamison said.
At the heart of Gem X is the story of how Ms. Garnett, now based in London, and Ms. Jamison, who splits her time between New York and Connecticut, founded the club. They met in 2014 when they shared a microscope in a colored-stone lab class at the Gemological Institute of America’s New York campus.
“Lin was in finance, and I was at a P.R. agency,” Ms. Garnett said. “We both had a love for art history, decorative arts and jewelry, and bonded over the fact that we were the only two people in class who didn’t come from a jewelry background.”
What began as a distraction from their day jobs quickly became an obsession. They began attending jewelry soirees in Manhattan, but “found there weren’t many geared toward a younger age range — we’re both in our 30s,” Ms. Garnett said. “We felt it would be fun to start planning our own events.”
Gem X’s inaugural affair was a March 2017 dinner for 20 at the National Arts Club (Ms. Jamison is a member) starring James and Pat Alger, married gem dealers based in New Hampshire.
“Over the course of the evening, Gem X heard stories of Jim’s gem expeditions and passed around his treasures,” Ms. Jamison wrote in an email. “They shared over 200 stones with our group, and many ended up going home with guests. Some favorites included bright orange fire opals, scintillating rutilated quartz, pleochroic tanzanites and baby pink morganites.”
Dozens of events followed: cocktails with the Dutch designer Bibi van der Velden, a private tour of the Cartier Mansion on Fifth Avenue, a screening of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
While direct contact with deluxe jewels and their makers is central to Gem X’s appeal, the club’s track record of facilitating friendships has proved to be an even bigger draw.
Christine Cheng, the gallery director for Simon Teakle, an estate jewelry dealer based in Greenwich, Conn., joined in 2017 after Ms. Jamison visited Mr. Teakle’s booth at the European Fine Art Fair in New York, or TEFAF.
“This is going to sound very woo-woo,” Ms. Cheng said. “A lot of my friends were moving out of New York. Then Lin invited me to this thing that turned out to be legit. I was just excited to meet friends and then, of course, when you have a shared love of jewelry and art, that helps strengthens any bond you make.”
Ms. Cheng and Mr. Higgs belong to the Gem X Core, a group of 10 people who help interview prospective members via phone and serve as something of a steering committee. Another Core member, Julie Chang, is spearheading a Los Angeles chapter. She plans to kick things off with a few L.A.-centric Gemflix events this summer and intends to announce the chapter’s first physical gathering when the time feels right.
The founders emphasize that Gem X is nowhere near as exclusive as the rarefied world it celebrates. The only requirement for membership, they say, is a genuine enthusiasm for jewelry. (They have, however, turned away people who want to use the club “as their next marketing tool,” Ms. Jamison said.)
For members who are extra-enthusiastic, Ms. Garnett and Ms. Jamison recently introduced a $1,000-per-year membership called Gem X Unlimited. It focuses on experiences, such as connecting members with V.I.P. client managers at jewelry boutiques around the world, assisting them with custom design projects, and insider tours at events like the Tucson gem shows, GemGenève and Masterpiece London.
It also comes with entree to the Vault, the jewelry-sharing platform that Ms. Garnett and Ms. Jamison dreamed up last fall after a weekend visit to Paris. The women had made a pilgrimage to the JAR boutique in Place Vendôme, where they purchased two pairs of sculptural, plant-inspired earrings from the costume jewelry collection of the cult designer Joel Arthur Rosenthal.
“We went halves on them,” Ms. Garnett said. “It struck us that part of the fun was going in with a group of friends, trying them on together, experimenting, hearing the stories.”
There already have been a few shares, a kind of soft launch, but starting this month, all Unlimited members will have the opportunity to borrow pieces on a first-come, first-served reservation basis. The Vault is expected to have a selection of three to five new items a month, pieces such as the JAR earrings, a custom granulated gold pendant that Ms. Nicole is creating for the club, or a ring it has commissioned from the London engraver and jeweler Castro Smith.
Think Rent the Runway meets “the sisterhood of the traveling jewels,” Ms. Jamison said. “We aren’t a business for selling jewels, per se, but what we want to do is connect people over jewels that they want and love together.”
And those connections include significant figures in the jewelry world.
On May 20, for example, the New York-based artist and jewelry maker Daniel Brush made a cameo appearance during a Gemflix talk. Beth Carver Wees, a curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, gave a virtual tour of the museum’s “Jewelry for America” exhibition that included Mr. Brush’s on-screen comments about an aluminum necklace, one of the exhibits. He created it in homage to a Scythian torque that he fell in love with in the 1970s, when he and his wife, Olivia, visited the Museum of Historical Treasures in Kyiv, Ukraine.
“I’ve thought about the power of a jewel for 50 years,” Mr. Brush told the Gemflix audience. “I’m sure all of you know that in the early writings — meaning the writings from the Talmud, or the writings you find in Arab cultures — it was the closest thing you could have to something bigger than yourself. That torque for me had it — it was community, family and dreams.”
Ms. Garnett, who moderated the “Jewelry for America” episode, said Mr. Brush “applied for membership right afterwards.”