Mr. Bling

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O ne by one, they whisper up, the four-wheeled throne rooms of the rich. On a mild, clear night in mid-September, the line around the club snaking a New York block, the Maybachs and Bentleys glide to a stop, and from a land-yacht swing two splendid pairs of legs. Serena and Venus Williams rise to full height, smoothing their skintight miniskirts and tossing their she-god braids. No sooner are they hustled through the door, however, than the next bolt of thunder comes rolling up, in the persons of LeBron James and his crew. You have just caught your breath when Nelly appears and is followed close behind by Fabolous, Foxy Brown, New York Jets running back Curtis Martin and Sacramento Kings forward Chris Webber, then Lars Ulrich and his skyscraping girlfriend, Connie Nielson. By the time Justin Timberlake sidles past, feigning anonymity in a gray fedora, you have given up trying to put names to faces and are rushing inside for a drink.

In the club, a cavernous Shangri-la with marble arches and stairs, beautiful women greet you with good champagne, while czars including Dick Parsons, chairman of Time Warner, mingle with rich fashionistas in pale Chanel and high-buff indoor tans, European playboys with knocked-stiff hair and expertly rumpled blazers, and B-boys laced in throwback jerseys and fortunes in pave diamonds.

The lights go down, people scurry for seats, and a spotlight picks out Wyclef Jean, who's plucking a guitar faced in round-cut diamonds. For close to an hour, he strums his greatest hits post-Fugees, as franchise models parade the runway wearing almost nothing but jewels. Here's Naomi Campbell, all feral hauteur, fire-walking like a panther in heat to flaunt her platinum chains. Here is the extravagantly tattooed Tyson Beckford, naked from the belt buckle up except for a chestful of diamonds. And here are your one-name cover girls, the Isabelis and Louises adorned with enough treasure to sink a galleon: a diamond-and-platinum halter that will be auctioned for $10 million and a slew of iced pendants, cast in red gold, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.

There's a brief intermission, during which Nelly gets up and does a three-song set. Then the house goes dark again, 'Clef returns, and a fresh round of gemstones comes out. But instead of gracing the necks of X-ray blondes, they're now being worn by a series of very tall men whose faces look oddly familiar. There's a stop-time moment before it hits you that walking the runway is an All-Star team of professional basketball players. Vince Carter, Elton Brand, Antawn Jamison, Damon Stoudamire -- each here at his own expense to model the creations of their friend, the jeweler known simply as the Iceman.

When the last of the athletes exits left and the house lights come up full, a slightly built bald man in a cashmere suit appears, to huge applause. Blinking back the glare, a shy smile spreading across his face, he looks more like a natty patent lawyer than the man who elevated bling from crude flash to the status of haut monde must-have. He counts Halle Berry among his friends and clients, made Shaquille O'Neal's moon-size wedding ring and turned 50 Cent into a one-man ice cap, sporting half a million dollars' worth of diamonds. Thrusting aside old-line jewelers such as Harry Winston, he now dresses much of above-the-title Hollywood for the Super Bowl of bling, Oscar night, and is a fixture on film sets and video shoots, where Nelly, Lloyd Banks, Young Buck and others trot him out for cameos. What few of them know is that just eight years ago he was sleeping in the back of his rusty car and down to his last fifty dollars.

Since the day in South Africa, 120 years ago, when a man named Cecil Rhodes consolidated the diamond mines found in a field of two farmers called De Beers, the jewelry business has been much like the stones it sells: brilliant, obdurate and impervious to change. Setting aside the blood lineage of diamonds -- Rhodes founded what became Rhodesia, Rhodesia crafted apartheid and apartheid killed and/or subjugated millions -- it is a fiercely insular trade. Until recently, the most common way for outsiders to flourish was to marry the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, the rationale being that if a son-in-law stole, the money, at least, stayed in the family. In a commerce only slightly less incestuous than the House of Saud, fresh ideas came along rarely and mostly had to do with figuring out ways to sell the same rocks to a new generation of brides.

But far uptown, a wild new market was hatching. Street kids, dazzled by the gems pimps wore and the pendants MCs sported, aspired to their own ostentatious glow, and the gaudier the better. Gold rings sprouted on every finger, some covering two and three knuckles. Necklaces the size of bike chains flourished, and watches with sapphire crowns. The hood, in the person of New Orleans rapper Baby Gangsta, even coined a name for garish baubles: bling, or the sound of light bouncing off a gem, as in a TV sound effect. These homeys had money, and never mind where they got it; the streets were hot for diamonds. The minute brothers walked into Tiffany, though, the floor staff ducked for cover. B-boys shopping for polished gems? Someone call 9-1-1.

It was only a matter of time before someone noticed the fortune sitting in the doorway, begging. In New York, Jacob Arabo, better known as Jacob the Jeweler, moved in to service the East Coast trade with trinkets of crushed-ice exotica. Out West, however, that need went unmet until 1996, when an African striver without cash or connections stepped up to try his hand. His name was Chris Aire, and he'd come to America for reasons wholly removed from jewels. One of six children from a well-to-do family in the tiny West African nation of Benin, he'd grown up obsessed with Western culture, particularly its popular music. His father, who was a wealthy petroleum merchant, wanted to send him to Oxford, but Aire had different plans. At the age of eighteen, he scandalized his parents by hopping a flight to Memphis to pursue a singing career. (His father, infuriated, cut him off and left him not a penny when he died.) Eventually he found himself in California, going to school by day and flipping burgers at night. Dead broke, he wound up living in his ancient BMW and crying himself to sleep.

"I could always go home -- I still had that option -- but it would really have crushed my soul," Aire says. He is sprawled on a couch in his $1,000-a-night suite at the Ritz-Carlton in New York, having flown here to take in baseball's Armageddon, Yankees-Red Sox for the American League pennant. We're just back from Game One of the series, where we sat directly behind home plate as the guests of his friend and client Gary Sheffield. "And I still felt like there was hope for me here, but doing what, I had no clue," he adds. "I'd tried music -- nothing. Tried acting -- zero. The only thing I knew was that I wanted success worse than anyone wanted to stop me."

To that end, he borrowed $900 and enrolled in a self-help seminar. "It was one of those things where they put you with hundreds of people and make you pour your heart out to the room," he says. There, he befriended an Iranian kid whose father made mountings for jewelry. They took him on as part-time help, and in a year he was traveling to trade shows with them and sketching his own designs -- pendants with walls of floating ice and dog tags carved in hot white gold for the soldiers of the street. These drew, unsurprisingly, more scorn than sales orders from fourth-generation jewelers, each of whom bristled at the mention of words like urban market.

The other thing that escaped no one's notice was that Aire was the only black man in the business. Many times his fellow wholesalers stopped him and asked if he was in the wrong building. This was, of course, bigotry in blood-red letters, but its roots were as much tribal as racial. In a business that's all about who you know, no one was going to front him the stones or money to make his product line. To succeed, he would have to go directly to target clients -- rappers, jocks and film stars -- and try to sell them exotic jewelry that didn't exist.

Several weeks after the New York show, I meet up with Aire on the road. He lives, with his girlfriend and two young children, in a celebritycentric enclave north of Los Angeles, and runs a posh showroom and bustling factory near the Staples Center in downtown L.A. At least fifty weekends a year, though, he is away from home, tending to clients around the country. As the designer and president of 2 Awesome International, he is also its chief (read: only) salesman, and he personally books every penny of business that walks through the door. It is a maniacal lifestyle -- he works seven days a week and sleeps, at best, a handful of hours, staying up late to sketch something for Missy Elliott or place phone calls to Australia searching for canary diamonds. Though he is coy about his age (he says he's in his midthirties), his boyish face can look creased and wizened by the end of a three-day trip.

This week, his travels take him to Pittsburgh, home of the suddenly rock-ribbed Steelers. There, as in every other NFL city, he has several prominent clients to see and has taken a suite at the downtown Hilton, where the team spends the night before each home game. At 5 p.m. sharp, there's a knock on the door, and in walk linebackers Joey Porter and James Farrior, angling their mountainous delts and traps through the suddenly too-small threshold, followed by Chad Scott, the cat-quick cornerback. Trading hugs with Aire, the three Steelers arrange themselves at a table.

A suitcase is fetched from the adjoining room by Aire's bodyguard and friend Joseph Agbi. As its contents are laid before them, the players, who have been fussing with cell phones and pagers, suddenly drop into gape-jawed silence. Porter cranes forward. "Goddamn," he says in a reverent hush, "is that 50 Cent's iced-out watch?"

"It is," says Aire, wearing a red leather jacket and rimless custom shades. "And that's the pendant I made for Snoop, and the dog tags Eminem has."

Now the other two are on their feet, grinning. They try on the pale-fire platinum watch, with its dense crust of diamonds on band and bezel and dashing, bouclier face, and fondle the 400-carat diamond necklace with giddy, knowing awe. They're all talking fast and spending faster, selling themselves a white-gold bracelet to match the chain they own, or a red-gold watch with rows of diamonds to wear to the Super Bowl. Aire, meanwhile, says next to nothing, stepping in and out, anticipating desire. That, more than diamonds, is what's on display here: the sheer power of human wants, chiefly the lust for beauty. No one really needs a crushed-ice watch that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, or a platinum cross grand enough to build a small church around. But the heart, says the poet, wants what it wants, and so do the wrist and both earlobes.

Later, after they've settled up, the stars file out for dinner. Aire, however, just keeps on working. He carries two cell phones wherever he goes, and one or both of them is always ringing, be it Juvenile checking on some custom pendants or Master P hondling for the new Aire Traveler Timepiece, his back-ordered signature watch.

How he got here is an object lesson in that most American institution, self-made luck. In 1996, having left the wholesaler to design his own custom jewelry, Aire scraped together some borrowed stones and made castings of several prototypes. Securing the pieces in a shoulder bag, he set out to track down celebrities, convinced that if he could just display his goods, the stuff would sell itself. He installed himself at hotel bars, ordering drinks he couldn't afford, and staked out clubs in Malibu for a chance encounter with fame. "I knew nobody in show business and had no rich friends," he says. "But when you think about it, most of my clients went through that, getting turned down by record people and casting agents before they got a deal. If they could survive that, so could I."

During this period, Aire put in twelve-hour days, then went out at night in his one good suit with a stack of business cards. He stood on the steps of the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, California, hoping to meet a visiting player in town to face the Lakers. For two years, he kept up his bruising siege, getting ignored by stars, who treated him like he was selling fake watches on La Cienega.

And then one day, he stopped Gary Payton outside the Ritz and asked to show him his wares. Not here, said the then-Seattle Sonics guard; get at me later this week when I'm in Miami. That Friday, Aire boarded a coach-class flight with directions to a South Beach blowout. There, he sold Payton a platinum pendant in the shape of a basketball, plus chains and bracelets worth tens of thousands to the rest of Payton's crew. This was during the winter of '98, and Aire, exhausted and deep in debt, might easily have flown back home to dance a jig. Instead, he plowed the money into new designs and packed for the NBA draft. Working the lobby of the Vancouver Hilton, he walked up to Damon Stoudamire of the Portland Trail Blazers and told him he was Payton's jeweler. The star guard promptly ordered a Rolex from him that was encrusted with layers of diamonds, as well as a necklace with his first initial in platinum and ice. Stoudamire sent Aire to several teammates, among them Rasheed Wallace and Jermaine O'Neal. They told their friends, and then those friends told their friends, and by the time the '99 season wrapped, Aire had half the league on lock and was cruising the NFL.

There exists, among brand-name athletes of color, an intersport fraternity of power and wealth, with chapters in most big towns. Aire was now invited to mansion parties commingling shortstops, point guards, tailbacks and boxers, as well as platinum rappers. He used his access and charm to ingratiate himself anew and began selling to the likes of Master P and Snoop Dogg. At one such affair, he met Cedric the Entertainer, who christened him the Iceman. By the time he turned thirty, he was the jeweler of choice to most of black Hollywood, and he was starting to sell to paler clients such as Madonna and Paris Hilton.

Predictably, not everyone is thrilled at that development. "These guys who do bling -- their stuff's like cavity fillings," sniffs a representative of one of the Big Three jewelers (Tiffany, Harry Winston and Cartier). "What they sell isn't about quality -- it's about who can wear the biggest rocks. To me, they're like rappers who pour real champagne into hot tubs in their videos."

Carol Brodie Gelles, the global communications director for Harry Winston, is rather more diplomatic: "We make diamonds whose value isn't based on trends. Of course, we sell to clients whose money is, safe to say, older."

But Aire's clients, whose money is, safe to say, green, could care less about such cavils. "I'm just real proud of where Chris is, and that's about his character, not just skill," says Payton. "The first time I met him on the street in L.A., I saw a true brother trying to come up right, and you can't help but root for that. And then I put his stuff on, and the world just went wow. Whenever he makes something new, he calls me first, 'cause he knows I've got to have it."

"The thing about jewelry -- and I buy gangs of it, so I know -- is that everyone tries to steal the next man's thoughts," says Nelly. "But this dude's different. His stuff's so personal and so strong, you could put it in a museum. You also get the feeling that he lives for this, that he's down in the lab setting the stones himself like one of Santa's elves. You want that in a guy you're spending millions of dollars with, that it ain't about the money but the love."

Though no one wants to start a war of words, the veiled allusion is to the other "King of Bling," the Russian-born Jacob the Jeweler. Aire, to the extent that he mentions Jacob, pays praise to his craftsmanship, but there's the sense among certain stars I talked to that Jacob is about Trump-style glitz. His shop window in New York's diamond district would seem to bear that out, rife as it is with iced Yankee pendants and Christ charms that are practically life-size. Aire has made his own share of ghetto wares (example: the set of platinum teeth he fashioned for Baby), but he has steadily evolved in the course of the last years into an artist whose palette is gems. A skilled metallurgist, he invented a process that turned gold an autumn rose, and he began setting rocks of complex shapes against its dusky warmth.

"If there's one plus to being a total outsider, it's that I don't have the same ideas as other jewelers and feel free to make anything I think of," says Aire. "Now, where those thoughts come from, I can't tell you. But the one thing I do know is that people need beauty, even if they don't know it. I'm here to bring it to as many of them as possible, and that means a whole class of people who never bought jewelry before, or bought stuff that was ugly and badly made."

As Aire's work has gotten more sophisticated, his best patrons have become more like collectors than customers. Recently, he visited Payton in Boston and noticed he was wearing an old necklace. Payton left the room and returned with a jewel box the size of a steamer trunk. Inside, polished and expertly kept, was every watch, chain and earring that Aire had designed since 1998. Asked what a holding like that might be worth now, Aire gave out a laugh. "Nice try," he said, "but I don't discuss numbers. It's a great way to become an ex-jeweler."

There isn't much chance of that happening. Last spring, he released a limited run of ready-to-wear watches and jewels, and was sold out in two months. Luxury outlets, among them Saks, can't keep his goods in stock. Manufacturers who wouldn't take his calls three years ago now court him night and day. Thus far, Aire has held off signing. But he knows he can't continue as a one-man show and must at some point choose between being the black Cartier and the jewelry version of Sean John. In the meantime, Aire will plow ahead -- and try to find an hour to steal a nap. "I won't lie to you: I'm tired, man," he says. "I've had ten days off in eight years. But I've got to stay out here or they'll forget me. It's like, for years, people told me a black man couldn't sell jewels. Well, here I am, and I'm not leaving. You can tell me no and even no, hell, no, but the only sound I hear is yes."