Queen Noor of Jordan, Courtney Love and Sting walk into a bar. The punchline?  They are all wearing designer jewelry and trendy couture by Justin Giunta – founder of Subversive Jewelry. Giunta – an artist's artist who applies his strategic aesthetic overload theory of “Subversive” to painting, lighting, space, clothing, and, most famously, his Subversive Jewelry designs - is currently the toast of New York City.

The artist himself reminds me somewhat of Peter Pan, as imagined by the French fashion designer, Jean-Paul Gaultier; He is dark, well-structured, and classy but for one element – an ornate scarf or crazy product-hair with plain grey slacks and black or white shirt. The net result (along with the smirking eyes) is entirely playful.  Giunta's work, too, is flamboyant and heavy, but it wants you to be young and free and fly. His paintings use white in an inspired way; his design of spaces uses light like some people use drywall. But it is his jewelry that's made him famous.

Giunta has dubbed his line of baroque baubles Subversive Jewelry, a name that sounds like an entire genre when in fact it is only a brand – a brilliant stroke of marketing that deprived some copywriter or PR person somewhere of the pleasure of coming up with it first: A jewelry revolution, it says, mutiny against conventional definitions of what makes a piece priceless. 

"Giunta's moment has come, and he is only 30"
 

…Subversive, in that Giunta's baroque, highly-wrought pieces are meant to undermine the jewelry and fashion establishments, blurring distinctions between art and consumer culture, and between fine looking old things handpicked from the world's rubble and the beautiful, new, and commercial chains that (literally) bind them. The raw materials are not intrinsically valuable. It's the design!

 Subversive Jewelry
 

2009's Council of Fashion Designers of America's - CFDA - Swarovski Award Recipient for Accessory Design, Giunta can no longer claim to be anti-establishment. (Fashion is forever caught in the dialectic process of I vs. We; Popularity and sale-ability becomes something of a blessing, and something of a curse. If everyone is wearing it, it is no longer haute couture. If no one is, it is not really fashionable.) 

Giunta's popularity is no exception. He even had a line of jewelry available at basic prices at the mass-market retailer: Target. And he has royal and star clientele, who can (and do) pay thousands for a piece of Oriental 17th century fantasy, luxuriant strands out of Beckford's Vathek.

This is the old Andy Warhol fine-art-as-commercial-consumer-pop theme again – in fact, Giunta (unsurprisingly) cites Warhol as a major influence in the creation of his 'wearable art'. A New Yorker's New Yorker with all the coolest art schooling (Pratt-Reitveld-Mellon-Yale), Giunta's moment has come, and he is only 30.
 

Andy Warhol

Vogue, Oprah, Glamour and Harpers Bazaar have all featured his pieces, which Giunta classifies as Subversive in yet another way: to draw the eye to the piece, and away from a less attractive wearer. Quite simply, purchased artifice - beauty in a bead. Like it is, all women look stunning... in the right jewelry. 

And since every Target Chain Store shopper has once dreamed of being an Arabian princess, Cleopatra, or a Lady on a Renaissance Court, if piles of shiny, fancy, old, new and colorful, remade things can take her there, she has joined the revolution.

An accomplice in Giunta's Subversive Art and Marketing, selling herself – at much higher value - to the admiring world. 

Check out this article about Justin Giunta and his Deviated by Justin Giunta label.