Michal Negrin's floral, ornate earrings and necklaces have a
large and devoted following; and her shops, located around the world,
are the places where her romantic aesthetic is given free rein.
Incongruous
among the factories in the industrial zone of Bat Yam, south of Tel
Aviv, blazes the green trademark Michal Negrin sign. It is the same
trademark sign you can see in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas or the St.
Germain quartier in Paris. Beyond a heavy factory door is the
sabra jewelry artist's central office, workshop and showroom. Negrin's
vintage floral designs have changed the definition of Israeli jewelry
in the world and her fantasy-rich sensibility made her the choice to
design a ring and brooch for the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister
of Magic in the 2007 movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Her sensibility permeates every inch of Michal Negrin World (972-3-555-3326; www.michalnegrin.com),
the Bat Yam office's visitor center. And it is a world of fantasy come
true, replete with Victorian charm—from the hall filled with dazzling
chandeliers, gilt-edged furniture and cozy nooks for conversations to a
gallery that includes hand-crafted illuminated dollhouses to tours that
show artisans at work. At the Gallery Café, the scent of fresh coffee
and cake beckons visitors, who sit on ornate loveseats while choosing
between sumptuous chocolate tarts and rich cheesecake.
Michal
Negrin, 52, a petite, dark-haired woman with a pixy haircut and puckish
sense of humor, is at the gallery today. She reaches into a jewelry
display cabinet and removes a wide bracelet, turning it, stretching it
across her slim, tanned wrist. "Look closely,"she says, pointing to the
tiny antique roses, aqua silk florets and brass petals. "In the center
of each flower is a bud made of Swarovski crystal. Every flower is
slightly different. That's because we hand paint each one twice.”
Next
Negrin examines a multistrand necklace with more than 200 different
design elements—flowers and crystals and fine metalwork reminiscent of
the Yemenite filigree perfected by immigrants in the 1950s. Jewelry
remains the heart of her work, but there is much more. Negrin pauses at
the miniature figures and furniture in dollhouse after dollhouse, shows
how real water runs in a hanging diorama of a Victorian country scene,
then switches on a miniature lamp to reveal a cherub hiding in the
diorama. "I like surprises and mystery,"she says.
She
also likes hearts, lace, kewpie dolls, shawls, parasols, carriages,
fans and the colors pink, blue, peach, yellow, green, lavender and
off-white, shades favored in the romantic Victorian period.
Everything
in the gallery is handmade—either the work of Negrin's hands or those
of some 200 designers and craftspeople, mostly immigrants from the
former Soviet Union, who produce the jewelry and accessories. "I wanted
a podium for the ideas I can't fit in a store in a shopping
center,"said Negrin. Michal Negrin World opened in the spring of 2009
and is drawing both Israelis and tourists from abroad. They can witness
the artisans at work, choosing beads, painting flowers and assembling
collages; watch a film of Negrin's personal history; and relax and shop
in the gallery. Even the bathrooms in Michal Negrin World are tiled
with vintage designs and flowers.
Negrin's
alarm wakes her at 5:20 A.M. at her home in Tel Aviv's fashionable Neve
Tzedek neighborhood, where 25 years ago she first peddled her handmade
earrings and pins at the city's famed Nahlat Binyamin crafts fair. She
runs three times a week along the Tel Aviv streets and beach front,
reads three newspapers together with her husband, Meir Negrin, and then
drives south to Bat Yam, the mothership of her international network of
more than 50 stores.
She sees her role in the
workshops and gallery in Bat Yam as "conducting an orchestra of
workers."She starts the day in the fashion department and then moves to
graphics, jewelry and, finally, the gallery. "Over the years, I've
learned to trust my own taste and to create designs that please me and
my customers,"she says. "I always want to elicit a smile, and to create
a warm, child-like sense of comfort.”
She has
cultivated young designers from the Shenkar School of Engineering and
Design in Tel Aviv and the Academic Institute of Technology in Holon to
work with her and to use computers in designing her products. "I'm
fascinated by the potential to design on a computer screen and then to
transfer it to a finished product of metal and other materials."But her
most important lesson to her protégés is "jewelry has more than beauty,
it has personality.”
The jewelry that made her
world-famous includes extravagant chandelier earrings, elaborate
chokers with rows of muted, colored flowers and crystals and
rose-shaped rings. In response to customers' requests, her newest
collection has gone upscale, generously using gold and silver instead
of brass.
Another new collection deviates from
her usual style. "Last year, in the midst of the deepening world
economic crises, my staff started to get worried that I was spending so
much time playing with paper dolls, moving their limbs, arranging them
on paper, photographing them,"says Negrin. "Then, using a computer
program developed in our studio, I turned the paper-doll design into
brass pieces of women with movable arms and legs, linked them together
and fashioned them into a necklace reflecting the special connection
among women.”
At first, international franchise
owners balked, afraid of introducing new designs, preferring to play it
safe with "classic Michal Negrin."She eventually overcame their
resistance. "I simply can't do the same over and over,"Negrin adds.
Slim
and vivacious, Negrin wears her own designs, modeling the jewelry and
fashion. Today, she is wearing one of her favorite ribbed A-shirts, the
sleeveless undergarment called a Grandpa undershirt in Israel. Hers is
dyed green and printed with Victorian images of dancing girls and
sailor boys. It is topped with a short jacket. To create the shirt
design, she arranged dolls, flowers and valentines on a table,
photographed them and then transferred the scene to fabric. The
comfortable shirt comes in sizes for real women, insists Negrin. "I've
always loved these ribbed undershirts,"she notes. "They remind me of my
childhood.”
Back on Kibbutz Naan, where Negrin
grew up, such shirts—minus the color and decoration—were de rigueur for
the no-frills socialist farmers. But while others were bleaching shirts
a stark white and decorating public places with the uncluttered, modern
lines typifying kibbutz artistic sensibility, as a child, Negrin was
catching rides to Tel Aviv, browsing in antique shops for boxes of
sepia postcards showing women in long dresses at balls, angels and
cupids, men in frock jackets. Hers was an unusual hobby for a girl who
took her turn working in the fields, but her indulgent mother, Ada
Green, was a non-conformist, too, a modern dance choreographer who
lived on the kibbutz. "I think people accepted my being different
because I was Ada Green's daughter,"Negrin says. Her father, David
Ben-Gurion's grandson, Israel Green, worked in the kibbutz secretariat
and accounting department.
And so, her
intricate rococo, floral designs began to take root on the kibbutz. She
began making jewelry on her own, turned down as an apprentice by a
professional jewelry maker because, as he said, he "didn't want to
crush her creative spirit."She experimented with gluing pearls on lace,
and joined the other young sabra artists in the crafts fairs on
Tuesdays and Fridays in Tel Aviv. She began building a customer base by
word of mouth from a cadre of fans, women who returned often to her
stand to see her new and original designs. In 1993, she opened her
first signature shop on trendy Sheinken Street in Tel Aviv. Today,
there are Michal Negrin shops in 15 countries; Japan alone has more
than a dozen. The newest store scheduled to open will be in Croatia.
The
shops feature a constantly expanding line of products—from bedsheets to
perfume packaged in old-fashioned collectible bottles. Actresses Nicole
Kidman and Demi Moore are among her Hollywood fans.
Negrin's
franchised stores have to compete in today's global economic crunch.
"There's plenty of competition out there,"Negrin says. "You have to be
constantly creative to keep the customer's interest and confidence."And
while the old expression is that "imitation is flattery,"her success
has inspired many knock-offs.
Several of her
franchises did close after her empire expanded too quickly, including
her New York store and a number of the Israeli shops. "We're back to
what I like to call ‘more accurate' size and marketing,"she says.
However,
the three-month-old boutique n Boston's upscale Faneuil Hall (Quincy
Market) is doing well. It is a large, bright store—a departure from the
boudoir atmosphere of many of her other outlets—and filled with many
customers on a Sunday afternoon in October.
Twenty-something saleswoman Michelle Mendrick has sold one customer two skirts and a dress, and another bought three dresses.
A
man is interested in buying a pair of fancy, decorated leather boots
for the woman in his life. (Today they are 25 percent off the usual
$700 price tag.) "They're handmade in Israel,"Mendrick tells him.
"Customers are usually delighted and impressed that the products are all made in Israel, not in China,"Mendrick says.
"Jewelry
is still number one,"says franchise owner Tzion Barsheshet. The
fine-gold and silver collections are selling well. Despite the
resistance of franchise owners, the paper-dolls turned into jewelry has
been the biggest hit of all. "I can't keep them in stock,"he says.
At
the Boston store opening, the Negrins celebrated their 25th wedding
anniversary. Their only daughter, Jasmine, 24, has joined the business.
"Everyone who works for us is part of the family, too,"Michal Negrin
insists. "The idea behind all my work is to create harmony among people
and disparate elements—big and small, dark and light, hidden and
apparent.”
This harmony is the image of Israel
she wants to project in the world: "The work has to have meaning.
Ultimately, this is a Zionist message.”
She
visits her brothers and aunts who have remained on kibbutz often, and
is delighted to see many of the kibbutzniks wearing her jewelry. The
fieldworkers haven't switched to her colorful Grandpa shirts, yet, but
you never know what the future will bring. H
