On a cool, damp mid-June afternoon in Manhattan, just the other side of a morning filled with showers, I find myself chasing Lauren Santo Domingo through the wilds of Central Park, looking for rare birds.
“Our family, during COVID, got very into bird-watching,” says Santo Domingo, the Moda Operandi cofounder and, since 2023, the artistic director of Tiffany Co.’s home collection. (She and her family aren’t alone in their avian fascination: Two thousand paper cranes took flight at Thom Browne’s fall 2025 show, while birds also accessorized Marni, Luar, and Jun Takahashi’s Undercover.)
“My son in particular got very good at identifying them—male and female and that kind of thing.”
As the park’s Ramble leads us into Tupelo Meadow—dominated by an enormous, ancient tupelo tree, one of the few trees that likely predate Central Park itself—we spot our first bird. Desiree Rodriquez St-Plice, our guide from the Central Park Conservancy, identifies it as a white-throated sparrow. “They normally go up North by this time of the year—I guess this one got left behind,” she tells us. “You both probably know it’s just past migration season right now”—reader, we did not—“so now they’re in their mating and nesting stage.”
High above us in that very same tupelo tree, we spot what Santo Domingo and I, if hard-pressed, would call a tiny speckled bird and what Rodriguez St-Plice knows is a European starling, a species originally released in Central Park in 1890 by a Shakespeare enthusiast (and avid birder) inspired by the starling’s mention in Henry IV. Moments later, as we make our way around a curved path, a gorgeous blue jay reveals itself.
Alas: Of the 200 or so species of birds that can be regularly found in Central Park, well located as it is on the Atlantic Flyway (the East Coast’s bird superhighway), Santo Domingo and I are limited in our discoveries to these three beautiful creatures—along, of course, with plenty of the common pigeon, which Rodriguez St-Plice tells us (to Santo Domingo’s visible relief) is more formally known as a rock dove. But sometimes even one bird is enough, I say, to which Rodriguez St-Plice heartily agrees.
“It really can brighten your day,” she says, “just seeing one little bird.”
If the rara avis of Central Park are elusive, though, the Peter Marino–redesigned 10th floor of the famous Tiffany Co. headquarters at the corner of 57th and Fifth in Manhattan proves to be invaluable for adding to one’s life list. That’s where Santo Domingo—in a trench from The Row, a COS shirt, Frankie Shop pants, and carrying a vintage Bottega bag—and I meet Nathalie Verdeille, Tiffany’s chief artistic officer of jewelry and high jewelry. Verdeille, in a black men’s blazer and black Alber Elbaz–era Lanvin pants with a notable sparkly stripe down the side, walks us through her new Bird on a Rock collection (or, more accurately, collections).
The original Bird on a Rock design, inspired by a yellow cockatoo that Tiffany’s legendary jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger discovered near his second home in Guadalupe, was created in 1965 as a brooch, with Bunny Mellon purchasing one of the first pieces, which featured a cabochon lapis lazuli with yellow and white diamonds. Verdeille’s reinvention expands that single piece to two distinct flocks of bejeweled imaginings: Two of them, in the high jewelry category, are centered around, respectively, tanzanites (a necklace, a bracelet, and earrings) and turquoise (a statement necklace with a diamond bird grasping strands of cabochon turquoise, a pendant, a brooch, and a ring), with both stones having a long history with the house.
The fine jewelry collection, meanwhile, features rings, earrings (which can be worn four entirely different ways), bracelets, and necklaces showcasing vivid textures meant to evoke a bird’s plumage, while birds themselves are the beating, glittering heart of the necklaces. When the rings are stacked, they interlock in much the same way as the feathers on a bird’s wing. Both collections launch September 2.
Unlike Santo Domingo and me, Verdeille, 49—who graduated from Paris’s prestigious Haute École de Joaillerie before finding her way to Cartier, Chaumet, and, since 2021, Tiffany—didn’t tramp through Central Park looking for inspiration: Instead, she scoured the massive Tiffany archive, though her prime inspiration was Schlumberger’s yellow cockatoo.
“He was—what’s the bird that collects things? He was a magpie,” Santo Domingo says. “He would travel all around the globe looking for new techniques, new materials, new craft, and he would collect beautiful things.”
“We tried to re-create the notion of levitation,” says Verdeille, “so that you feel that the bird is flying. Taken together as a whole collection, it adds up to a kind of poetry.”
Each bird she designed, of course, required different diamonds—different sizes, shapes, colors—and different amounts of diamonds, with some 20 or 30 on each head. (The tanzanite necklace, meanwhile, contains 594 diamonds and took almost 350 hours to create.) “Each one changes depending on how you wear it,” Verdeille says. “When you wear it, you create a new dimension.”
Aside from reinterpreting Schlumberger’s long-ago vision, Verdeille was out to do nothing less than transform the house of Tiffany. “How can we play with the DNA of the past while moving the bird, and the house, forward?” she asked herself. By adding movement and fluidity.
“The old tradition in Paris was to study the movement of animals at a zoo,” Verdeille continues, “and that was how we worked to compose this new bird—the wing, the tail.” In Verdeille’s “think different” tradition, though, the question was actually raised: Why did it have to be a cockatoo—or even a bird, for that matter?
“Before we settled on the cockatoo,” Verdeille says, “we did some owls, we did some peacocks, we did some, how do you say? Some pigeons.”
“Rock dove,” Santo Domingo says, “really does just sound so much nicer.”
