Tiffany takes the prize for the chain most name-checked in literature, cinema and song. It is the first of the jewellers listed in Marilyn Monroe’s Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, while in the best-known scene from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, based on Truman Capote’s novella, Audrey Hepburn stands transfixed before the windows of the Fifth Avenue store. So great is the desire to be associated with its image of elegance that this branch accounts for 9 per cent of all sales, although Tiffany, founded in 1837, has another 170 stores world-wide, including five UK outlets.

British visitors to New York report that the Christmas decorations at the Fifth Avenue store are sufficiently breathtaking to make you forget the city’s bone-chilling weather, matching the winter-wonderland glamour of the chain’s seasonal ad campaign. This features Shalom Harlow, the model, as a snow queen whose heart has been melted by diamonds.

The temperatures were more benign when I paused on Monday morning to admire the more understated decorations in the Tiffany’s store in Old Bond Street. The windows were decked with simple pine fronds so as not to distract attention from the handsome 18th-century building – a real-estate bauble valued at £73 million.

My trip down Bond Street was my first step into Christmas, but others were evidently well ahead of me on the journey. Shoppers scurried inside the store, seeming already to know their way to a particular cabinet on the ground floor where the best pieces were displayed, or to the first floor for the “fashion” or inexpensive jewellery.

Tiffany has positioned itself as both a people’s and a moneyed people’s jeweller: its Christmas present suggestions range from a £50 keyring and a £200 charm to a £16,200 pair of diamond pendant earrings. More flamboyant displays of generosity can also be facilitated, with such stocking fillers as a necklace made with yellow diamonds at £812,000.

I noted that the degree of satisfaction evident in the faces of other customers did not seem linked to the number of noughts on the price tag – proof of the allure of Tiffany’s little blue box in which all goods are wrapped. This early example of how packaging can be the best marketing dates back to 1837.

The air of equality conferred on the merchandise by the little blue box did not, however, extend to the level of service on the first floor. There were too few of the painstakingly polite assistants for the throng of customers wanting to view such items as the Elsa Peretti cuff bracelets (£410), the Paloma Picasso Tenderness rings (£130), and the torque rings (£85 to £1,225 in silver, rose gold, black gold and agate) designed by Frank Gehry, the architect. But everyone seemed happy to wait, secure in the knowledge that they were buying the thing their daughter/ girlfriend/wife/best friend, er, really, really wanted – although that may not be quite Tiffany’s class of song.

THE LINKS IN THE CHAIN

Tiffany’s 2006 sales were $2.6 billion (£1.3 billion); net earnings were $253.9 million (£125 million)

Retail is detail

Layout: spacious; not as swish as you might suppose 7/10
Staff: hugely patient 9/10
Website: glitteringly glamorous 9/10
Bags: iconic 8/10
Overall score: upmarket but not off-putting 8/10

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