healing heart

i lost my cherished, clear crystal Kazuko heart pendant yesterday, gifted to me years ago by a dear friend who then worked at Barneys where Kazuko's jewelry and Kazuko herself were both fixtures.

i wonder if the universe simply needed it back?

once upon a time in a 1998 feature story, an EVP of Barneys said of the Kazuko craze, " the first jewelry we had in the store was the single stones of clear crystal with bold wrapping... They were mostly pendants to be pinned on. Then she did hearts, and I didn't understand. 'Barneys is not a heart store,' I told her. But she kept bringing them back, and it became the right thing."  http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/22/style/a-priestess-of-zen-adornment.html

i always found it to be an object of incredible simplicity, beauty and calm, light and bright on the body and warm to the touch after wearing.  i already miss tucking it back into its spot in the jewelry drawer of my dresser.

the heart, and the shiny gold wire wrapped around it, also came to symbolize part of my own fashion history.  while it was given to me by one friend from Barneys, another small piece was presented to me years later by Kazuko herself through connection to yet another friend who i came to work with at YSL, all of us neatly and not so neatly intertwined through our roles and grateful for the transformative properties of Kazuko's crystals to instill in us the higher powers we needed to meet our latest, greatest challenges in the line of fashion duty...

and speaking of fashion duty, earlier this week, two of us met up for a lunch meeting at The Modern and even uttered Kazuko's name as i commented on the beauty of the signature, chunky amulet my friend was wearing.  minutes after our lunch, we bumped into none other than the legendary Andre Leon Talley at Manolo Blahnik and a brief but meaningful exchange took place among crystals of an entirely different but equally wondrous sort.

if there is a moral to the story, perhaps it is simply that positive energy and light will continue to find us when we believe they are there to be discovered.  after all, fashion is love.

small Kazuko crystal, circa 1998