LOCAL JEWELRY DESIGNER LEARNS MORE ABOUT OLD LOOK THAT'S NEW IN JEWELRY

A local jewelry designer has returned to Cape Girardeau with the "new look" in jewelry for the fall season after attending a New York jewelry show July 18.

Chuck McGinty, owner of C.P. McGinty Jewelers, and his wife, Laura, spent three days scrutinizing jewelry of designers and manufacturers from around the world. They've now traveled to five New York jewelry shows.

"Every year new designs and hot items for the next fall season are presented," McGinty said. "We feel New York is one of the better shows.

"We get to see what's going on in the rest of the world because the show features a large number of suppliers and manufacturers from foreign countries."

He said a large group attended from China, Italy and Japan, and smaller delegations came from Germany, Poland, Africa, Thailand, Srilanka, France, Portugal and Spain.

The show took place at the Jacob Javitts Center on the west side of Manhattan. The display area occupied over three football fields of floor space, McGinty said.

Toggle bracelets, matte-finished gold, and cabachon-cut colored stones set in gold bezels, followed by flush-mounted diamonds represented the new look, he said.

This look was inspired by jewelry of 300 to 500 A.D., a period called the Byzantine Empire, he said. Featured was jewelry with a matte finish, and the stones were mostly cabachon-cut, which is the shape of a bald head.

"Shaped like a rounded lump, the stones are not faceted and refined like the stones in the United States," McGinty said.

Another new, hot item featured was antique coin jewelry that was discovered after ship wrecks in the Atlantic Ocean.

Some of the dark-gray coins dated back to the 1600s, he said, and were mounted in matte-finished gold circles or bezels suspended on each side by a link chain.

Also shown were baguette-cut diamond jewelry, loads of fashion watches, sterling silver jewelry, and colored-stone jewelry, he said.

McGinty said he was particularly interested in the new-designers section, which was an area about five aisles wide featuring 200 separate booths of young people who brought their original designs to sell.

"Many of the designs were so far ahead of time that it may be the year 2000 before the designs will be seen and worn every day," he said. "Those young designers are extremely brave and take a big chance because it's expensive to rent a booth for four days."

He said many of them don't sell anything, whereas some of the more common suppliers might sell $400,000 worth of merchandise.

"In preparing for the fall, we are inspired by the new designs," McGinty said, "and we plan on cherry-picking what we saw and making some of those things ourselves."

"The people who come to the markets are very fashionably dressed," he said. "It felt almost like a three-day fashion show."

The McGintys have been attending jewelry shows for about 12 years. "We've been to Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles and Kansas, but we feel New York is the best place to go."

Next spring they plan to make a trip to a jewelry show in Las Vegas.