Swarovski's costume jewellery brand

Swarovski's costume jewellery brand, for example, now competes for many consumers who also scout - and can afford - Chopard, Tiffany, Cartier, Bulgari and comparable fine jewellery collections for their bling.

''In fashion, it's not shocking any more to mix designer (labels) with high street brands,'' says Swarovski's French creative director, Nathalie Colin (pictured). ''So you find the same principle working here: fine jewellery (brands) now work like fashion jewellery brands, and fashion jewellery brands like fine jewellery brands.''

It's a concept that tempers, or even negates, the allure of genuine diamond, sapphire or ruby jewellery if the rival in the consumer's mind is a crystal-based alternative as finely crafted, as fashionably designed, and as cunningly marketed as the real bling.

The tiny price cards placed around the Swarovski ''crystal forest'' store by Japanese designer Tokukin Yoshioka, the focus of Monday's marketing extravaganza, for instance, showed sums ranging from just $180 for rings and $500 for necklaces of precious-looking, hand-cut multifacetted and coloured ''stones'' that would sell for tens of thousands more were they mined from the earth.

''All those frontiers in the world; in food, in fashion, in jewellery, are getting totally blurred,'' Ms Colin says. ''Everything is cross-fertilising.''

She says Swarovski's history - it was founded in Austria in 1895 by entrepreneurial glass cutter Daniel Swarovski, and evolved into a multibillion-dollar company with integrity in crystal products from industrial tools to road safety equipment - and what she calls its ''DNA'' of fine jewellery crafts, contributes to that blurring and crossing of markets.

The rest is achieved with luxury-look stores, luxury-look advertising and luxury-based marketing such as Monday night's party and appearance by the iconic Blondie which, incidentally, triggered a wide viral fallout as A-listers tweeted and Facebooked their delight even before they had been whisked by limousine away from Bennelong Point.

''This material has a spontaneous fascination,'' Ms Colin says of the watery pure and brilliantly coloured crystals she worked into a collection of modernist and exotic jewels dubbed Wings of Poetry. ''It is a lively material, like a chameleon, mysterious and capturing.'' She could as easily have described her marketing campaign.