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"  Robert Lee Morris Collection Galactic Spear Necklace ($1,250); Photo: Robert Lee Morris After a moment away from the spotlight and taking on a different business partner, jewelry legend Robert Lee Morris and many of his worldly possessions have settled into a brand new studio on Fifth Avenue. Morris&amp;#039; creations are the epitome of art meets fashion (his Artwear gallery in the 1970s was popular with both crowds). The designer&amp;#039;s pieces, such as African breastplates, futuristic collars and cuffs, and knuckle rings are timeless\u2014or as he describes it &amp;quot;caught in that zone of no time, or all time.&amp;quot; ELLE.com caught up with Morris at his latest outpost to chat over Momofuku muffins about his latest ventures and his friendship with Andy Warhol.  ELLE: Last year you split with your partner, the diamond company Fabricant. Why? Robert Lee Morris: Fabricant tried to bring me into the world of fine jewelry, and for 12 years that was an ongoing struggle. My work is so strongly fashion, and it meant I had to downplay my exuberance and sculptural dimension to something that would fit into jewelry cases and sit next to Rolex watches and David Yurman [pieces]. That was a hard nut for me to swallow for a long time. I never quite felt that I had any management [there] who knew what to do with me, whereas the ownership of this company [Miriam Haskell] is the leader in fashion-costume jewelry, and they have licenses with designers who are my peers. ELLE: Which jewelry designers do you have your eye on? RLM: The ones that stick out to me are the ones that I resonate with, ones like Pamela Love. She creates a language of her own that&amp;#039;s very original and unique, and any of these guys who are able to do that, I respect very much. ELLE: Let&amp;#039;s talk about your new collection for fall. RLM: It&amp;#039;s a combination of the iconic RLM from the very beginning, pieces that are signature, like the knuckle ring, as well as ones that were developed in the &amp;#039;70s and continue to be as relevant today. This year we did a group called Galactic, which is very architectural, and a group called Static. ELLE: There&amp;#039;s a beautiful shirt-cuff piece in the Static collection. RLM: I&amp;#039;ve always specialized in cuffs and collars. I call it the Folded French Cuff, and we&amp;#039;re doing it with interesting combinations of silver plated, gunmetal plated, and gold plated. All of it is brass casting, which I used to do year in, year out. I always did brass castings that I would plate in various castings, or I would do silver castings. But when silver skyrocketed up to close to $50 for an ounce, it sent shock waves through the whole industry, and suddenly for anyone working in big, bold silver shapes like me, it became unaffordable or it would be considered fine jewelry. A collar like this was probably like $450 or $650 back in the day when silver was affordable; now it would end up being at least $2,000, and it&amp;#039;s no longer fun fashion at that price. ELLE: That&amp;#039;s a big price hike.  \u2028 RLM: I&amp;#039;ve always wanted my work to be more available. I had this vision when I was younger of wanting to replace all of the bad jewelry in mom and pop jewelry stores with good designs. [I wanted to offer] a range of crazy, experimental one-of-a-kind pieces that would have integrity and be made of great construction as well as interesting engineering. ELLE: What&amp;#039;s your jump-off point in a collection? RLM: I start off with necklaces as my base, and I go from there. [Then,] I create the earrings and the bracelets. The necklace is the anchor; it&amp;#039;s the classification of jewelry that says what the whole idea is about. When I worked with Donna [Karan], she would primarily work with a buckle or belted hardware as her main element, and then branch out from there. ELLE: In addition to Donna Karan, you&amp;#039;ve also designed accessories for Elizabeth &amp;amp;amp; James. Are you still collaborating with designers? RLM: Yes, on and off. It depends if I&amp;#039;m busy. ELLE: You have created Andy Warhol collections and were friends with him. What was he like? RLM: Andy would give me gifts personally; he was a big client. He liked my work. He liked the craziest things. In the beginning he came in with his pals. He bought masks, headgear, segmented snake belts, and sterling silver and 18-karat gold, big cuffs. He just bought them to have them. After he died, the auction revealed what he had and some people bought them and showed me. ELLE: Did you ever spend time together as friends? RLM: He was a very dear friend and invited me to the studio a lot. He admired anyone who was\u2014let&amp;#039;s put it this way\u2014male, young hip, and happening. And Artwear couldn&amp;#039;t have been more &amp;quot;happening&amp;quot; in terms of the celebrities that were flowing through all the time. He invited me to dinner on a pretty regular basis and gave me paintings. He would pull them out from underneath [the table] in brown paper. \u2028 ELLE: Do you still have them? RLM: I have some yeah. I&amp;#039;ve got a hamburger and an After The Party big silk screen. They are nice; I&amp;#039;ve kept them around for years. They were on canvas and signed &amp;quot;To RLM, love Andy&amp;quot; or to &amp;quot;Robert Lee.&amp;quot; ELLE: How was it trying to fit all your stuff from your previous 2,000 square foot studio in to this smaller space? RLM: I had decades of stuff and props from my retail store. I do the displays there. I had to really move most of it into my home, where my wife and daughter have been waiting for me to get rid of it. It was a cathartic situation.  Robert Lee Morris Collection French Cuff ($1,250); Photo: Robert Lee Morris  Robert Lee Morris Collection Galactic Petal Ring ($295); Photo: Robert Lee Morris "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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