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Pop stars Beyoncé and Jay-Z posing for Tiffany & Co.’s About Love ad campaign. Beyoncé  is wearing the Tiffany Diamond necklace.

CELEBRITY-DRIVEN DIAMOND AD CAMPAIGN DRAWS THE ATTENTION OF THE WOKE MOVEMENT

 

A new ad campaign featuring the flashiest of diamonds and the flashiest of rock stars has generated a media storm that goes beyond what even its planners intended, and says much about the woke society in which we live and operate.

The gemstone in question is the 128-54-carat canary-yellow Tiffany Diamond, and the rock stars are today’s embodiment of pop royalty, the married couple Beyoncé Knowles and Jay-Z Carter. The campaign was launched by the venerable U.S. jewelry chain Tiffany & Co. and called About Love.

“Beyoncé and Jay-Z are the epitome of the modern love story,” said Alexandre Arnault, Tiffany’s the jewelry company’s vice president of product and communications, in a press release. “As a brand that has always stood for love, strength, and self-expression, we could not think of a more iconic couple that better represents Tiffany’s values. We are honored to have the Carters as a part of the Tiffany family.”

For the campaign, Beyoncé was photographed wearing the Tiffany Diamond necklace, a jewelry item made famous by the legendary Audrey Hepburn, and a matching 22-carat cushion-cut fancy yellow diamond ring. Jay-Z, dressed in a tuxedo that matches his wife’s black dress, is also wearing a full collection of Tiffany diamond jewelry, including the famous Bird on a Rock brooch by Jean Schlumberger.

The exact details as to how much the musicians were paid for their efforts are hard to come by,  but both sides let it be known that the campaign is the offshoot of  an already close collaboration between the Carters and Tiffany, part of which the jewelry company will donate $2 million toward historically Black colleges and universities.

DIAMONDS ARE ‘NOT BEYONCÉ’S BEST FRIEND’

Not everyone was impressed. Writing in the Washington Post, Karen Attiah, was blistering in her attack, both on Beyoncé and Jay-Z and on Tiffany.

“Diamonds, I’m sorry to say, aren’t Beyoncé’s best friend — even if the Grammy Award-winning artist and her new corporate partner, Tiffany and Co., would like to make it so,” Attiah wrote.

“Tiffany may be trying to rebrand, but it has badly misjudged the ethos of the moment,” she continued. “Its campaign does not celebrate Black liberation — it elevates a painful symbol of colonialism. It presents an ostentatious display of wealth as a sign of progress in an age when Black Americans possess just 4 percent of the United States’ total household wealth. If Black success is defined by being paid to wear White people’s large colonial diamonds, then we are truly still in the sunken place.”

Kimberley Mine circa 1886, the year before the inset 128-54-carat canary-yellow Tiffany Diamond was discovered.

Apparently embarrassed by the outcry, Beyoncé released a statement through unnamed sources, in which she seemed to blame Tiffany for withholding information about the piece of jewelry she was wearing. “’Beyonce is aware of the criticism and is disappointed and angry that she wasn’t made aware of questions about its history,” the source told The Sun, a British tabloid. “She thought that every final detail had been vetted, but now she realizes that the diamond itself was overlooked.”

For the record, and according to the jewelry company’s website featuring the new About Love campaign, the Tiffany Diamond was discovered in the Kimberley diamond mines in South Africa in 1877. It was acquired the following year by the jewelry company’s founder Charles Lewis Tiffany for $18,000. It was cut in Paris, where Tiffany’s chief gemologist, Dr. George Frederick Kunz, over saw the fashioning of the cushion-shaped brilliant, with an unprecedented 82 facets, 24 more facets than the traditional 58-facet brilliant cut.

The woke movement decries historic systemic discrimination, questioning the validity of cultural icons from a bygone age.

WOKENESS AS A NEW REPUTATIONAL THREAT

For more than 20 years already, the jewelry industry has struggled to counter reputational threats, associated mainly with the mining of what became known as conflict diamonds. These were stones being used to fuel civil wars in a number of African countries, most notably Sierra Leone, Angola and the DRC. The launch of the Kimberley process Certification Scheme in 2003 largely eliminated the threat, and helped bring most of those the civil conflicts to a close, as the rebel groups lost their primary source of financing.

In her Washington Post op-ed, Attiah made an oblique reference to the Kimberley Process. “It’s time that we expand the definition of blood diamonds and conflict minerals. For years, blood diamonds and conflict minerals from Africa were defined narrowly, as resources used by dangerous militias and warlords to finance their operations. But thousands of African lives were lost and communities destroyed in the colonial quest to control the continent’s resources. And today, South Africa’s White minority continues to hold most of the country’s power and wealth. So, yes, it doesn’t go too far to say: Beyoncé is wearing a blood diamond,” she wrote.

The unbridled attack on Beyoncé and Jay-Z represents a new challenge for the industry, fired by “woke” consciousness, which fast has become one of the more powerful political and cultural forces of our times. Amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, it decries historic systemic discrimination, questioning the validity of cultural icons such as the Tiffany Diamond, which was mined when Kimberley Mine was located in a British colonial outpost, more than 20 years before the establishment of what today is South Africa.

Writing late last year, Andrew Sullivan, the editor of The New Republic wrote about woke social awareness in an article that foresaw the type of criticism that would be leveled at Beyoncé and Jay-Z.  “And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening […] they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame,” he noted.

The sad irony, of course, is in their zeal to publicly label diamonds or those who promote them as colonial abominations, the woke movement is endangering the livelihood of literally millions of poor Africans, living in a post-colonial environment, who rely on the income generated by the gemstone to feed their children and build a future for their families.

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