Alexis Bittar

Alexis Bittar

Alexis Bittar started selling vintage jewellery on St Mark's Place in Manhattan at about thirteen, and by 1990 was hand-carving Lucite in his one-bedroom apartment with no design training at all. Bergdorf Goodman's fashion director Dawn Mello discovered him in 1992, which is the placement that made the career.

Jewelry

Lucite is the whole signature. Bittar taught himself to carve it by hand after seeing someone cut a sheet of it, adapting the glass-carving and fusing logic of René Lalique to plastic. He was twenty-two, working out of a Brooklyn apartment, and he had dropped out of university in his second semester.

More Jewelry

The institutional recognition came early and stayed. Henri Bendel and the Guggenheim shop picked him up in 1992, he made a Lucite-and-steel furniture collection for Cooper-Hewitt in 1996, designed Burberry's first ready-to-wear jewellery in 1998 by putting the house plaid onto Lucite, and made custom pieces for Sex and the City with Patricia Field in 2002. His work was on the September 2008 cover of French Vogue, styled by Carine Roitfeld.

More from the collection

The ownership story is a round trip. He partnered with TSG Consumer Partners in 2010, sold the brand to Carolee, the jewellery arm of Brooks Brothers, in 2015 and exited entirely, then bought his own name back in 2020 after Brooks Brothers filed for bankruptcy. He relaunched in 2021 with four New York boutiques and one in San Francisco.

Our honest take

Bittar won CFDA Accessory Designer of the Year in 2010, has taken four ACE awards, and kept most manufacturing in Brooklyn rather than offshoring it. Tyla wore his Solanales crystal collar with Balmain to the 2024 Met Gala, which is a good summary of where the brand sits now. Buy the Lucite, which is the thing nobody else does properly.