His Piave earrings sparkle. His cashmere wraps are head turners. His collections are one-of-a-kind. We’re talking about designer Ian Saude. He says that is piece is designed so that anyone who wears it feels like a celebrity.

He’s creative. He’s fabulous. He’s given this exclusive interview to the Celebutante Sisters. Check it out and then check out his Web site, IanSaude.com. You’ll be surfing his designs for hours!

When did you first realize that you wanted to become a designer?

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I have always been interested in design and loved art and architecture as a child. I grew up in a beautiful but fairly rural environment on the Central Coast of California, which I appreciate now much more than I did growing up. Even as a kid, I would use any excuse to get my parents to travel — to take me to a major city, just to marvel at the buildings, to visit museums and restaurants, and to see fantastic stores where the merchandise was so inventive and beautifully presented. I used to sketch and to look at art books and fashion magazines a lot, but I guess I never thought of that as a viable career. So, even when I was in college and studying humanities, I never formally studied much in the way of design.

It was later, when I was living in Kathmandu and studying Buddhist philosophy on my own after college, that I got involved doing quality control for a company working in silver jewelry from Nepal. I had to spend time with local artisans to learn about their craft in order to deal with certain design and production issues. Working with them I grew to respect their art. However, I realized that a gulf existed between what people from different cultures considered beautiful or interesting or innovative. It made me start to consider how so much of what surround us everyday only exists because of choices that have been made for us by someone else. Much of this was once just someone else’s vision, someone’s design.

Although it still took me a while to become confident enough to really spread my wings as far as my own sensibilities were concerned, I guess it was then that I realized that I wanted to create beautiful things — things that sparked the imagination and yet were also useful and capable of becoming part of the texture of people’s everyday lives. I started to examine the whole idea of design, the process of making choices in order to create something sophisticated and unique, and how each one of those choices influenced the final outcome. I always try to challenge myself, and I feel that the more I learn and understand, the better my designs become. So, I’m committed to perpetual evolution.

Tell us about the materials that you use in your designs.

I don’t have any hard and fast rules about the kind of materials I do or don’t use. I’ve used all kinds of things over the years. However, I definitely favor natural materials, and the more unique and the higher the quality the better.

Although I occasionally work in platinum or silver, these days I favor 18k gold for most of my jewelry. We are also using “black rhodium” accents on many of the rose and yellow gold pieces. It looks great with champagne or mocca colored diamonds, and I love the contrast. I also am lucky to work with some excellent stonecutters. So, that allows me a certain degree of freedom in using colors or creating shapes or cuts that are specific to a particular piece. I’d like to push the envelope with this kind of work in the future — doing more and more one-of-a-kind pieces where a cutter is working side by side with myself and other goldsmiths to customize the piece as it is being fabricated. In the age of mass production and the bottom line, this kind of work is a dying art form.

As far as clothing goes, I’ve also worked with a lot of different fabrics in the past and it’s always fun to check out new and unusual blends, but I’m mostly known for making cashmere wraps and blankets. There has been a lot of adulteration of “cashmere” over the last 10 years or so, with the Chinese flooding the market with a lot of cashmere blends and inferior quality yarns that have confused customers and lowered the perceived value of the material. Regardless of the cost, I prefer to work with the best yarns that I can find. I love a more rustic style of weaving, as compared to much of the traditional cashmere accessories you see coming out of Scotland or Italy. I always aim to design pieces that are the same quality as the best Italian and Scottish cashmere, but that are more hip and contemporary — stuff that is fun to wear, not staid or fussy.

Your earrings are gorgeous…and so unique! How do you come up with all of the beautiful stone/metal combinations?

Since I have spent a number of years designing other kinds of accessories besides jewelry, I understand the importance of color in fashion. Color is a kind of zeitgeist: it needs to capture people’s attention and express the mood or the energy of a time. People react to color in a very visceral way. Someone might appreciate the intelligence behind how a great suit is constructed, how a special piece of eveningwear is embellished, or how a stunning pair of earrings is sculptured and painstakingly finished. But if they don’t like the color, they’ll never even take the time to appreciate those other factors. Color is key. It’s the first thing most people notice, and based on color, they usually generate a lot of subtle opinions without even realizing it. So, when I started the design process to launched my new brand, I wanted to accomplish three things with color:

First, I wanted to create jewelry that used colored stones but in a way that was still versatile enough to work with contemporary fashion. A lot of jewelry has all kinds of candy-bright gemstones on it, and a lot of traditional jewelers favor these colors. I like them too, but how often does a woman go out dressed in every color of the rainbow. Not much. So I went for a sophisticated neutral pallet and muted pastels that I felt work better with most clothes.

Secondly, I wanted to use stones that complimented the color of the metals or to treat the metals in some cases to better accent the stones. Shades like mocca, caffe and champagne diamonds look stunning in yellow or rose gold and they are a softer and more natural-looking fit than white diamonds. They look great in the daytime, and a woman can rock them without feeling like she is blinged-out!

Third, since people’s moods change, the way they feel about any given color changes as well. So, especially with the earrings, I wanted to give women the ability to change colors whenever possible. This is why a lot of my dangle earrings come apart and also why, this season, I will be adding a number of new dangles to fit our Acqua huggies and some of other hoops as well. This way a woman can change up her look to match an outfit, transition from day to evening or pack for a trip without having to invest in a whole new pair of earrings.

I like to use unique colors that are cued into contemporary fashion, but these colors are not always easy to find. Luckily, as I said before, I’m really fortunate to have some great stone sources. I always ask them to show me whatever new rough materials they come across, even if we only can find a little bit. One of the virtues of being a smaller, private company is that we don’t have to do 1000 pieces of something to make it worth doing. So, if I love something and know I want to use it, I just buy it.

Your cashmere wraps always seem to be re-invented each season. How do you come up with the design?

I’ve been working with cashmere for quite a while and I used to do a lot of private label work for other designers in Milan and elsewhere. When you are producing for great design houses you need to be able to show them a lot of different samples, then turn on a dime and take all their feedback and specs and turn those samples into another generation of prototypes (or two, or three, or ten!), sometimes within a very short time period. Working with them is kind of like training for the Olympics!

I remember one sample we did for Zegna where they wanted us to produce a silk and cashmere scarf that had 7 different colored stripes on the warp and something like 20 colors on the weft. All the yarns had to be color matched and individually hand dyed, then we had to loom up at least 25 pieces even though they only wanted to see one sample. All this had to happen within a few days. People think designers flit between coffee houses and private salons, talking about art all day. The reality, unfortunately, is a bit less glamorous.

The moral of the story is you can’t have any shortage of ideas and you need to work fast. Most of my cashmere scarves are produced in Nepal, and I lived there for almost 14 years. So, I spent many years working side by side with the weavers, dyers, spinners, embroiderers, tailors and so on. I understand what is involved in the sampling process and in doing each of their jobs. I also know how each artisan is different, and I know what can go wrong. Each one has certain strengths and weaknesses and something that they love to do. So, I try to design with an eye toward showcasing their individual talents and to interpreting the materials and techniques at my disposal to fit the mood of any given season in order to realize my vision for that collection.

What are you currently working on?

Right now I am finishing the prototypes for a number of additions to my Meteor collection, including the new dangles that I spoke about before. I am also working to design a few new red-carpet pieces for next year. I am putting together the concepts for a new men’s jewelry line for release in mid 2010. Outside of some really awesome watches that I can’t afford, I really don’t see much men’s jewelry out there that I’d personally like to wear. So, I figured that means I better make some! In cashmere, I am working on a little group of shawls for a Holiday/Resort collection for this winter. I am also working on getting some new weaves ready for men’s scarves and also some heavier styles that might be suitable for doing custom blankets for luxury hotels and resorts as well as doing private label development for other designers.

How does it feel when you see celebrities sporting your beautiful wraps and jewelry?

It’s been great to see more and more celebrities wearing and even collecting my stuff. It’s a really nice seal of approval, and, of course, it doesn’t hurt my brand image either! So, I definitely appreciate their interest and support. Ultimately though, celebrities are usually just normal people who have encountered an extraordinary set of circumstances. So, I don’t design exclusively with a celebrity client in mind. Instead, I want my collections to be inclusive. I want to create pieces that can make anyone feel special. Everyone has hidden talents, qualities and abilities, but many of us are never given the opportunity to express them fully. A piece of clothing or jewelry can’t completely change that. But strangely enough, sometimes wearing something special has the ability to make you feel differently about yourself, and that feeling can motivate you to become the person you are really meant to be.