Jacob Arabo (born 1965) is the Bukharian-Uzbek-born American jeweller who founded Jacob & Co. in New York in 1986 and built it into one of the principal contemporary high-jewellery and watchmaking houses, in the process becoming the public face of the hip-hop jewellery boom of the 1990s and 2000s.

Origins

Arabo was born in Tashkent, then in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, into a Bukharian Jewish family with a generations-long jewellery tradition. The family emigrated to the United States in 1979, settling in Forest Hills, Queens. Arabo enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan but left before graduating to apprentice as a jeweller, working through the New York Diamond District in the early 1980s. He opened his own atelier under the name Jacob & Co. in 1986 in the diamond exchange building at 580 Fifth Avenue.

The hip-hop years

The break to broad cultural visibility came in the mid-1990s when Arabo's work began to appear on figures including The Notorious B.I.G., Sean Combs, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Pharrell Williams, Lil Wayne, Kanye West and later Drake. "Jacob the Jeweler" became a fixture of hip-hop lyrics; the name appears in dozens of songs from the period and the brand became, for a generation of artists, the default jeweller of choice. The signature work of this period was the heavily diamond-set five-time-zone watch (see separate entry), the iced-out Cuban-link chain in extreme density, and pendants set with fancy-coloured diamonds in scale and density not seen at retail elsewhere.

Legal proceedings of 2006-2008

The brand suffered a significant interruption when Arabo was indicted in 2006 by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in connection with the Black Mafia Family money-laundering investigation. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to falsifying records and making false statements to federal investigators, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and a $2 million fine, and served his time at FCI Allenwood Low. He returned to active management of Jacob & Co. on release.

Repositioning

The post-2010 trajectory of Jacob & Co. has been a deliberate move up-market and toward technical watchmaking. The Astronomia tourbillon series (2014 onwards), with its three-axis tourbillon and orbiting time and moon-phase modules, is the signature of the repositioned brand. The Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon (a partnership with Bugatti Automobiles) and the Twin Turbo Furious series have placed the house in the upper tier of the independent watchmaking market. The high-jewellery work continues, with a particular signature in coloured-diamond pavé and in the use of large fancy-shape coloured stones.

Position in the field

Arabo's career is unusual in modern jewellery for combining serious technical watchmaking with a clearly-defined cultural moment in popular music. Few jewellers of comparable scale have been as visible in the entertainment world or as identified with a specific musical genre. The brand's recovery from the 2006-2008 legal episode and its subsequent repositioning toward the haute-horlogerie tier has produced one of the more distinctive arcs in contemporary American jewellery.