She had grown up in a cramped apartment in South Los Angeles, above a laundromat whose machines shook the floor when the weekend crowds arrived. Her mother, Denise, worked long hours as a hospital records clerk, and her grandmother repaired clothing, costume jewelry, and anything small enough to fit beneath a lamp. Some evenings the three women ate dinner at a folding table surrounded by garments waiting for new hems. Diana learned early that an object did not have to be new to be treasured, and that skill was often the difference between throwing something away and giving it another twenty years of use.
Evelyn's eyesight had begun to fail when Diana was eleven, which was how the girl became the family's unofficial inspector of tiny things. She held earrings beneath the lamp, counted missing links in chains, and pointed out crooked settings before her grandmother could feel them with her fingertips. Evelyn taught her to hold a stone under a moving light and pay attention to how it changed, and taught her that a customer's story mattered as much as a piece's price. A ring might be worth forty dollars to a jeweler and everything in the world to the woman whose husband had worn it before he died.
When Diana was fourteen, a neighbor named Mrs. Ellis brought in a broken brooch shaped like a hummingbird. Its tiny blue stones were mostly intact, but one wing had snapped off and the clasp hung loose. Mrs. Ellis explained that her mother had worn it to church every Sunday and that she could not afford a professional restoration. Diana spent three evenings beside Evelyn repairing the piece, using tools borrowed from a jeweler who let them repay the favor by cleaning his displays.
Mrs. Ellis cried when she opened the small box. Diana remembered being frightened by the tears until the woman laughed and pinned the hummingbird to her blouse. "You didn't fix a brooch," Mrs. Ellis said. "You gave me a little piece of my mother back."
Years later, when celebrities asked Diana how she had learned to design jewelry that felt personal, she often thought of the hummingbird and did not always tell the story. The luxury magazines preferred an origin involving rare stones and European ateliers. Diana preferred the truth: before she learned about scarcity and investment-grade gems, she learned that objects could hold memory. No advertising campaign had ever improved on that understanding.
The first time a prestigious jewelry store made her feel unwelcome, she was twenty years old and wearing her best blouse. She had saved for weeks to buy her mother a small pair of earrings, something real that Denise could wear to work without worrying about losing it. The store was bright and nearly empty, but two associates looked at Diana's cheap handbag and went back to discussing a weekend party. When she asked to see a pair of earrings in a locked cabinet, one of them told her to try the discount counter in a department store across the street.