History
Harry Winston's father Jacob started a small jewelry business after he and Harry's mother immigrated to the United States from Ukraine. He worked in his father's shop growing up, and legend has it that when he was 12 years old, he recognized a two-carat emerald in a pawn shop, bought it for 25 cents, and sold it two days later for $800.
Winston's jewelry empire began with his acquisition of Arabella Huntington's famous jewelry collection. The wife of railroad magnate Henry Huntington, Arabella amassed one of the world's most prestigious collections of jewelry largely from Parisian jewelers such as Cartier.
When Winston bought the collection after her death, the designs of the collection were quite old fashioned. Winston redesigned the jewelry into more contemporary styles and showcased his unique skill at jewelry crafting. According to the Huntington museum, "He frequently boasted that Arabella's famous necklace of pearls now adorned the necks of at least two dozen women around the world."
Winston was among the most famous jewelers in the world, well-known to the general public. In the 1953 musical film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" includes the spoken interjection "Talk to me, Harry Winston, tell me all about it!" The Lauren Weisberger comic novel, Chasing Harry Winston, was published in May 2008.
Today, the Harry Winston Diamond Corporation operates eight salons in the U.S., in New York, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, Dallas, Honolulu, Bal Harbour, Chicago, and Costa Mesa, and seventeen salons in other countries.
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“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
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Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)