It’s hard to imagine anything as powerful in the American marketplace as Tiffany blue. It’s just a colour – a pale, aquamarine-teal – but when applied to small cardboard boxes, ribbons and bags, it means everything from heirloom connection to loved ones to engagement euphoria for a fiancée. And even, as in the case of Holly Golightly, heaven incarnate. For Mr Truman Capote’s personification of mid-century elegance, as portrayed by Ms Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast At Tiffany’s, the brand and its shiny baubles were a metaphor for love.

So, if you are Mr Reed Krakoff, coming in as chief artistic director of the brand in 2017, you certainly don’t want to change too much. You don’t want to tarnish the world’s sentimental attachment to Tiffany & Co. But at the same time, you’re Mr Reed Krakoff. You turned Coach bags into Coach bags. You converted the brand from a utilitarian leathermaker, when you started there in 1996, into a billion-dollar business with a covetable ready-to-wear line. The houses you own and decorate with your wife are the regular subjects of breathless coverage by glossy magazines and art collectors. You have taste. You have pizzazz. You have something to offer, even to an august brand such as Tiffany & Co. And what you have to offer is, delightfully, now available on MR PORTER, in all its sly (a sterling silver tape measure), irreverent (Tiffany-blue poker set) and deliriously decadent (solid sterling silver beer mug, anyone?) glory, just in time to wrap up under a Christmas tree.

Mr Krakoff was born in 1964 and grew up in Weston, Connecticut. His parents were great early collectors of Messrs Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Donald Sultan. After dabbling in jazz, Mr Krakoff studied design at Parsons School of Design in New York and soon began working at Ralph Lauren. He was creative director of Tommy Hilfiger before moving to Coach, where he was executive creative director for nearly 15 years. On a brilliantly bright autumn day in New York, he sat in his office overlooking Madison Square Park and talked about putting all of his life and lessons into the famous powder-blue box.

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Tiffany & Co. is famous as a jewellery company. Are men buying and wearing jewellery differently from the way they did, say, 20 or 40 years ago?

Yeah, I think the biggest shift is that it’s been a long while since men’s style was at the forefront. A broad-base men’s style. But it’s more about curating than it is about jewellery. I think that men see jewellery as something they can make their own, such as a watch or their favourite limited-edition sneaker or a handmade suit. Things that are special. They become part of your style. I want to curate different parts of my everyday life, as opposed to having just the one suit or one piece of jewellery that I take out once a year to wear with black tie. To me, that’s the heart of American style – individual and everyday luxury – and we try to incorporate it into everything we do. Everything’s meant to be worn, to be used, regardless of the price, regardless of the function. It’s not meant to be put in a jewellery box and put away in a cupboard.

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When you came to Tiffany, did you spend a lot of time geeking out on the archive?

I did. I really, genuinely looked at every single catalogue from the beginning. From the 1800s. There weren’t pictures in the beginning, obviously, more descriptions. I went through tons of sketches, imagery, advertising, store photos, installations, windows that were done by Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg. Warhol did some work for Tiffany. Ward Bennett, the industrial designer, did some work for Tiffany. Obviously, Elsa Peretti and Schlumberger did all these amazing things. So, like I typically do when I work on anything, I really just want to learn everything and then I put it away. I can get too stuck in what was. You start to become kind of myopic. You have to realise that it has to be today’s version of that.

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What is the articulation of Tiffany today?

There’s so much to pull apart. In a funny way, I think people find comfort in tradition. And repetition, whether it’s celebrating things or gatherings or visiting certain places. And I think people feel particularly good about those things today. There’s also such a mix of present and past now. I can’t remember when it’s been like that, where there’s such a love for nostalgia but there’s such a hyper-contemporariness happening at the same time. Everything is available everywhere all the time. I was reading a story from a New York magazine from the 1970s and it was like a microfiche, but it was printed and online. It was just such a funny thing to read. It was paper, but it was on my phone. It was a perfect summary of what’s happening.

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How does that impact a company in the business of making heirlooms?

Well, we’re talking about men, and men’s style is timeless. Most things have happened a few times, whether it’s peak lapels or wing tips or white T-shirts and khakis, which everyone wore in the 1990s and nobody wears any more. Fitted suits, all those things that come and go and come and go and come and go, so I think in a way they’re not really the past. They’re just part of men’s style, a cycle. There’s a language and it slightly tweaks now and again. But you can see where the derivation came from pretty easily. Like this collection, the jewellery part of it was really based on iconic men’s jewellery – an ID bracelet, signet rings, dog tags, a chain concept, cufflinks, stud sets, all the things that are part of a man’s wardrobe. But I’m trying to reinvent them in a way that still feels wearable, but doesn’t feel costumey.

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Do you have any heirlooms that mark time for you?

It’s funny. From my dad, I do. He gave me a “Think” paperweight from IBM that I’ve had my whole life.

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Did it come with a dollar of IBM stock?

I wish. I’ve had it for ever. That’s one good thing. He bought me my first custom-made shirt from Turnbull & Asser when I was 14. It’s more experiences like that that suggest what men’s style is about – more about the way of living than the thing itself.

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These elevated versions of everyday objects definitely describe a way of living. Where did the idea for the beer mug come from? It’s almost medieval.

You know what it was? To me, it’s the ultimate expression of something perfect and beautifully made that you can use all the time. In the archive, we had a bunch of sterling silver tankards and I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if it didn’t look like a tankard? And maybe we create something kind of modern and streamlined, but still it had that feeling of something that was from the past. We did 10 versions. It’s actually perfect because it gets cold. Silver conducts. One of the amazing things is our workshop makes a lot of the first samples. It’s pretty incredible to see this made from a flat sheet of sterling silver. And then they spin it on a wheel and it takes the shape and it’s incredible to watch. It’s really something for me. I’ve always loved making things and how people make things and I just feel like there’s just no substitute for that. The alarm clock is another good example. It took a year to get that exactly right because it was meant to reference a vintage clock. But if you look, even the back is all sterling silver. It takes a long time to get these exactly right, to make it something worthy of Tiffany as opposed to something maybe insignificant.

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Is the lifestyle you’re describing with these objects yours?

No. I think I’ve been a designer for so long that I don’t think about myself too much. I really don’t. I think of the brand and I think of something that… I don’t know. You can just tell when something’s desirable.

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How?

Trying. Researching things. If you walk into a room and put something on the table and nobody says anything, it’s not working. Everyone knows when something is right. The tape measure took for ever. It took almost two years to get a tape measure that was the right size, that worked. Everyone fell in love with it. It’s a definite thing, knowing when something’s right. I couldn’t tell you why. I could just tell you what it’s like. If I had more time, I wouldn’t touch it. I wouldn’t do anything more. That’s probably the thing. If it’s not right, I need to keep working on it.

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Which is why you don’t turn it off when you go home and put together these homes with your wife?

I mean, yes, my life is designed. My wife and I, that’s what we really do. She’s an architect, interior designer. I wouldn’t want to turn it off. It’s funny because people are like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to stop. I’ve got to put work aside, be home and be away from it.” But for me, it’s not really work. This is a pleasure and this is something that I feel lucky to be doing. It doesn’t occur to me to stop. What I do is I move around from different things. I work on men’s and then I work on jewellery and then I’ll work on a book and I’ll take pictures. I just shot a campaign for one of our projects and then I’ll work on an interior. That’s what keeps me fresh. We did a restaurant. We’ve done three or four of them now. The Blue Box Cafe, that was a different experience. As long as you can kind of move around and do different things, you’re still feeding the engine.

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Is that a learned behaviour or were you like that as a child?

I was kind of like that. I was always really obsessive – in a not so positive way. When I am into something, I want to see everything. I just want to understand the world and then I put it away and then make my own. The one place I don’t do that actually is jewellery. I find it really distracting to look at any jewellery while I’m designing. But if I’m working on a flask, I'll do research on just flasks from the 1930s, from the 1940s, from the 1970s, on engravings.

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What was your first perception of Tiffany’s?

I grew up with the brand. I remember visiting the store when I was young. The earliest memory I have was visiting the fourth floor, which is where the café is now. And they used to have these tablescapes by the best designers in the world. They had Angela Donaghy. They had John Dickinson, you name it, and it was just so spectacular. I was pretty young. I was about seven, eight years old. Tiffany has always been a magic place. It’s a store that everyone has a feeling about, but no one really knows what it looks like. We’re renovating the store right now and spending a lot of time talking about what it is about that store that makes it what it is. No one remembers any of it. It’s more of a spirit of that place and a feeling. It’s such an emotional brand. You have to capture that. I mean just the colour, the box. That’s what people remember.

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I don’t think there’s anything else in terms of emotional connection like a Tiffany’s box.

No, I don’t think so. It’s a big responsibility to populate those boxes with things that are worthy of the brand.

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