When auctioneer Phylis Kao approached the rostrum for Sotheby’s Contemporary and the Now sale last Tuesday, the last thing anyone in the room was thinking about was her outfit. The Lauder Collection segment of the evening sale had just concluded and, after a short intermission for champagne and a quick bathroom break, the room was still swimming. In just over an hour and half, Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker, sheathed in a tuxedo and black bowtie to celebrate the house’s inaugural sale at the Breuer building, coaxed in $527.5 million in sales, breezily surpassing the pre-sale low estimate of $379 million. That included the season’s most talked about piece of treasure, Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer for which sold for $236.4 million, earning Klimt an auction record and the portrait the distinction of being the second most expensive work at auction.
But when Kao took the stage and the crowd settled, another treasure caught the eye of everyone on the sales floor who wasn’t glued to their phone. Koa is usually a stunner and knows it. So does the media. Her fashion forward and often colorful outfits, combined with an expansive personality, can lean a bit camp (her signature move is switching to Mandarin or French for ten to 30 seconds at a time—what feels like a lifetime while fielding bids mid-auction), but the extravagance is balanced by keen intellect and even sharper wit. She’s an auctioneer for our time who is as comfortable in front of a Manet as she is on TikTok. That Tuesday, however, she was elegant and simply dressed, the deep V of her black tuxedo jacket punctuated by a neckless so gleaming and distinguished it could have been stolen from the Louvre.
The neckless in question was made in the mid 1980s by jewelry designer David Webb, and features carved emeralds, rubies, and cabochon sapphires. The center emerald is approximately 38 carats. It also happens to be on view, and on sale, at Sotheby’s retail salon in the Breuer’s lobby. (The auction house wouldn’t disclose the stunning rivière’s price, however, as it will be sold privately.)
Dressing specialists and auctioneers in precious stones and metals that are or will soon be up for auction is part and parcel for the watch and jewelry auctions, but a rather new element to the fine art evening sales. It’s an exercise in cross-marketing luxury items, that not only helps broaden an auction houses audience and consumer base but also makes its employees look fabulous on screen. And since the pandemic, streaming is how a vast number of people choose to watch and participate in auctions.
Auctioneer extraordinaire Phylis Kao at Sotheby’s Contemporary and The Now Evening Sale. Courtesy Sotheby. (Photography courtesy of Alive)
Julian Cassady Photography / Alive Coverage
For Sotheby’s, the practice of outfitting auctioneers in jewels didn’t come out of nowhere. According to Frank Everett, the house’s Vice Chairman of Jewelry, the whole thing “really started with COVID,” when live streamed auctions abruptly became a form of primetime entertainment rather than a cloistered ritual of the art market. “That was the first time they took on that entertainment aspect,” Everett told ARTnews. “We worked with a stylist then, advising staff on what to wear. And once viewers realized they were watching a show, it made sense the auctioneers dressed the part.”
Everett says he’s been dressing Sotheby’s women auctioneers “for years,” but Kao—who already treats auctions as a kind of controlled performance—“has taken it to a whole new level.” For the inaugural sale in the Breuer building, he knew she’d be in black tie, so he went hunting for something with scale and color that would read both on camera and across the room. That led him to David Webb, the mid-century American jeweler beloved for his exuberant mash-ups of hammered gold, carved jade, Greco-Roman motifs, and pre-Columbian references.
“Webb is quintessentially New York,” Everett said. “And they’re literally our across-the-street neighbor on Madison, so it felt like a nod—welcoming ourselves to the neighborhood.”
More importantly, Webb pieces carry volume; their stones telegraph at a distance. When an auctioneer becomes a screen presence as much as a stage one, he explained, “the jewelry has to be big enough to be seen. A lot of jewelry just doesn’t read from the rostrum.”
If this sounds suspiciously like brand placement, that’s because it is—proudly so. Everett compared it to red-carpet dressing, a form of slow-boil marketing that doesn’t necessarily sell the specific piece but builds recognition, desire, and halo effect. “When all eyes are on the auctioneer,” he said, “it’s an exciting moment for the jewelry. It’s a branding moment.”
Christie’s, meanwhile, has been doing its own version of the experiment—only there, the jewelry hasn’t appeared on the auctioneer but on the specialists surrounding him. During Thursday evening’s sale, Adrien Meyer paused mid-bidding to call attention to the Lalanne pieces worn by the design team—including works by Claude Lalanne from the McHenry Family Collection. The gesture wasn’t incidental.
Victoria Tudor, Christie’s Specialist and Head of Sale for Design, told ARTnews that for a house increasingly comfortable with cross-category collecting, it felt natural to bring jewelry—especially Lalanne jewelry—into the spotlight of an evening art sale. “Our colleagues in the Luxury and Magnificent Jewels departments do sometimes include pieces from upcoming auctions,” she said. “In these high-profile sales, where there’s momentum and global eyes on the livestream, it’s a wonderful opportunity.”
Claude Lalanne, “Groseille” necklace, circa 1990. Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd. 2025
But this wasn’t generic product placement. The McHenry jewelry comes wrapped in precisely the kind of provenance Christie’s likes to showcase during its marquee weeks: a deep, decades-long relationship between a New York family and the Lalannes, encompassing studio visits in Ury, early commissions, and even their involvement in the unrealized redesign of the Central Park Zoo gardens. “The McHenrys were really woven into the cultural fabric of New York,” Tudor said. “They were collecting straight from Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne over decades.”
For Tudor, highlighting the jewelry wasn’t just about visibility, it was about collapsing the old boundaries between fine art, design, and decorative arts. “We see so many cross-category collectors,” she said. “Clients who buy a Rothko or a Warhol also live with design and jewelry.” As the membranes between categories become more translucent, this kind of cross-promotion is a natural evolution.
And it works. Pieces of Lalanne jewelry routinely hammer at multiples of their estimates, and Tudor points to previous sales—including Sculpting Paradise in 2022, where works soared six, seven, even eight times their estimates—as proof that the market responds when provenance and aesthetic sensibility line up.
What emerged at both houses last week was the same idea: evening sales are no longer just about selling art. They are showcases, stages, broadcasts—and increasingly, every visible surface, every ornament, every lapel and neckline, is part of the pitch.
As the lines between luxury, art, and entertainment continue to blur, auction houses are learning what Hollywood mastered long ago: the show doesn’t start at the rostrum. It starts the moment the jewelry catches the light.
