Kenneth Jay Lane

American costume jewelry designer

Kenneth Jay Lane (April 22, 1932 – July 20, 2017) was an American costume jewelry designer.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of an automotive parts supplier, He is of Jewish descent. Lane attended the University of Michigan and the Rhode Island School of Design. Lane was a member of the New York art staff on Vogue, before going on to design footwear for Delman Shoes between 1956–58 and for the New York branch of Christian Dior from 1958–63, where he trained under Roger Vivier. From 1977 until his death his home in Manhattan was a duplex in the Stanford White mansion completed in 1892 and one of the few surviving mansions on Park Avenue. From 1923 77, it served as the home of the Advertising Club. At that time, it was converted into a cooperative apartment house. His living room is the former club library and features an original marble mantelpiece, original artwork and lamps designed by Robert Denning of Denning & Fourcade. Lane collected Orientalist paintings and there is a gallery named in his honor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in tribute to his philanthropy and bequests.

Lane started designing jewelry and launched his business in 1963 while producing bejeweled footwear for Dior and Arnold Scaasi. Writing for The New York Times at the time of Truman Capote's Black and White Ball in 1966, Marilyn Bender reported that the "most important men in a fashionable woman's life were her hairdresser, her make up artist and Kenneth Jay Lane." Lane's designs were hugely popular with a fashionable clientele that could have afforded authentic jewels; while stylists used them to complement the fashionable large hairstyles, short skirts and kaftans in fashion photographs. He won the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award in 1968. an English socialite who became his wife in 1974. They divorced in 1977. Kenneth Lane died in 2017, aged 85. No known immediate family members survive.

Kenneth Jay Lane was a member of London's swinging set who achieved a small piece of cultural immortality as the subject of a portrait by Warhol.