They were on to something. Today, four years after Tarantino began making be jeweled bugs full-time, Hollywood is swarming with them. Minnie Driver wore a crystal ring to the 1998 MTV Movie Awards in May, while Picture Perfect's Illeana Douglas had Tarantino craft a tiara for her May 16 wedding to TV producer Jonathan Axelrod. "Tarina has a way of making lovely, fresh designs," says Ashley Judd, who wore her insect clips to so many University of Kentucky (her alma mater) basketball games that cheerleaders worked up a line about them. "They're festive and outright glamorous."
That's just what their maker intended. "We want to make people feel good, to have something they'd love to give to someone else," Tarantino says. That suits shoppers at Barneys New York, Henri Bendel and Nordstrom, where the baubles sell at prices ranging from $25 for hair clips to $125 for a tiara. "Tarina invented a completely different category [of design]," says Beverly Center boutique owner Jennifer Kaufman. "It's both functional and beautiful."
With sales of $1 million expected this year, Tarantino recently hired three assistants and a manufacturer. And in June she moved the business out of the one-bedroom West Hollywood apartment she shares with her fiancé and business partner, Alfonso Campos, 29, and into a Hollywood studio that once served as silent-movie star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's dressing room. Not that he'd recognize it. With its sky blue ceilings and lavender-and-lime walls, the space "has a whimsical storybook feel," says Tarantino.
That's what you'd expect from a designer who cites The Brady Bunch and her "psychedelic hippie parents" as influences. The daughter of Jerry Tarantino, 49, a graphic artist turned cowboy stuntman, and Linda Anderson, 51, a painter, Tarantino grew up in Long Beach, Calif., where she began making clay jewelry as an after-school project. "Even as a kid I loved weird color combinations," she says. "I'd mix green with orange; I'd wear plaid with plaid." When she was 12, the family moved to rural Norco, Calif., where the trend-happy Tarantino recalls feeling like a misfit in "polka-dot jeans and Day-Glo shirts."
On one of Tarantino's regular shopping trips to L.A. with friends, her hairdresser asked her to pose for promotional photos, which soon led to regular modeling work. After her parents divorced in '85, Tarantino moved with her mother to Laguna Beach. In 1988, she graduated from the local high school and moved to Europe, where she worked for designers Jean Paul Gaultier and Katharine Hamnett in Paris and sold the jewelry she crafted in her spare time to stylists. But staying stick-thin soon became a drag. "Even when I was a size 6 my bookers would say, 'Lose just a couple more pounds,' " Tarantino recalls.
Instead, she returned to L.A. and continued to make jewelry while working part-time at M.A.C. That's where retailer Kaufman noticed her wares and began selling them. But Tarantino credits Campos, a Nicaraguan immigrant whom she met at a party in 1991, with getting the business off the ground. Not only did he personally show her sample box around town but when a bank refused them a $5,000 loan for supplies, he sold his Honda Civic to raise the cash. An actor, Campos is content to play the salesman while Tarantino works on extending her designs to T-shirts, handbags and shoes. "I'm more of the watchdog," he says. "She's inspired by life."
And love. The next big project for the duo is an October wedding. "That's where we'll put our profit this year," Tarantino says, happily. There's only one problem, she adds: "How will I get the wedding cake to look like it has crystals on it?"
Anne-Marie O'Neill
Anne-Marie Otey in Los Angeles
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