Photo from: http://crowejewelry.com/
When Sandra Bullock graced the cover of People Magazine in April as its Most Beautiful Woman for 2015, it was almost as if Lauren Bott was right there with her.
The jewelry Bullock wore in the photo was from Bott’s Crowe line, a venture she began a few years back – out of necessity.
As a costume designer for locally shot film and television productions, Bott constantly found it difficult finding the pieces of jewelry she needed for her scenes. While it is possible to borrow articles of clothing from places around town, “the one thing you really can’t borrow, from Saks or boutiques, is jewelry, and it’s sort of the one thing that was missing. So I got annoyed.”
She may have been annoyed at first, but then she got busy. She went to New York City for an intensive jewelry design program and had her cousin build her a workbench in her kitchen. “I started doing my own stuff and then presenting those as options to designers as opposed to bringing back a ton of stuff I knew wouldn’t work.”
And because of the contacts that she’d made over the years in film and television, other costume designers across the country started calling about using some of Bott’s pieces. In fact, Oscar-winning costume designer Sharon Davis was one of Bott’s first customers.
Her pieces have since been seen in Treme, True Detective, NCIS New Orleans, Now You See Me and The Best of Me, among others.
Typically the big network shows that film in New Orleans reserve the top positions for folks from L.A., yet Bott is one of the first locals to ascend to head costume designer – heading that department for Scream Queens. Still, she can become more obsessed with making jewelry than her film and television work.
She even found herself sneaking away during an anniversary trip to New York to design an anklet for a new series on Bravo.
But Crowe is also for the general public. It’s been sold at trunk shows from New York (Henri Bendel’s) to California (Jaimie Geller Jewelry), and it’s available at both local boutiques – like Weinstein’s and Mimi’s – and online.
A retail space of her own is a possibility in the future, Bott added.
For more, visit http://crowejewelry.com.
NOLAbeings Multimedia artist Claire Bangser created NOLAbeings as a portrait-based story project that marries... 
Voodoo in New Orleans: Reviving history: New Orleans fortune telling This article takes a deep dive into the history of Voodoo in New Orleans, its hybridization with Catholicism, and its present-day place in the city's culture. The author visits fortune-tellers in the French Quarter, using their guidance as a tool for introspection rather than a deterministic predictor of the future. Through her experiences in New Orleans, the author feels a mystical connection to both the past and the future. 