Vintage DeLizza & Elster (D&E) Jewelry

In 1947, William DeLizza and Harold Elster founded DeLizza & Elster, also known as D&E, in New York City. Their idea was to design and manufacture costume jewelry and accessories such as buttons and belt buckles for customers looking for a bit of sparkle after the austerity of World War II. Over the next several decades, until the firm closed in 1990, the company's client list would read like a who's who of costume jewelry, encompassing more than 800 firms, from Hattie Carnegie, Hobe, and Weiss to Sarah Coventry, Coro, Kramer. Regardless of whose name was on the final piece, D&E's designers, including William DeLizza's granddaughter Judy, made sure it was colorful. This applied to D&E's bib necklaces, five-link bracelets, earrings, and brooches. These pieces mixed fat, prong-set cabochons with slender navettes, often in a rainbow of colors. D&E designers also loved to work with gold-filigree balls and gaudy, so-called Easter Egg stones, which became something of a D&E signature. Because D&E produced unsigned jewelry for so many third parties, identification can be tricky. Characteristic construction techniques to look for include safety chains on bracelets, soldered pins on brooches, and figure-eight shaped "cups" to hold the rhinestones. The way in which D&E soldered pairs and trios of those cups together produced "puddling" on the backs of many D&E pieces. This puddling, though not unique to D&E jewelry, has become a quick identifier. In 1967, D&E decided to create a brand of its own by attaching paper tags with the words "Juliana Original" on some of its pieces. Not all of D&E's Juliana pieces were tagged, and none of them were signed on the pieces themselves. Compounding the problem of definitively identifying a vintage piece of Juliana is the fact that the brand lasted barely two years. Even so, today, the word Juliana is synonymous with DeLizza & Elster in the minds of many fans of vintage fashion jewelry.