Kenneth Jay Lane acknowledged no difference between costume and gem-stone jewellery, except that he preferred cheap materials because they could be made perfect, and allowed him to experiment freely with creating the illusion of glamour. Rich women mingled Lane’s rhinestones with their real diamonds, and working girls wore his repro pearls; he was the first costume jewellery designer whose name was recognised internationally.

Glass, resin and gilt did not limit the imagination; there were, he said, “no boundaries as to how many carats I can stick in something”. Lane, who has died aged 85, teased that what he did was “faque” and “junque”, but it wasn’t at all phoney, rather an American fusion of old craft and evolving technology. The metier was accidental, the result of curiosity (he never passed a museum without going in), and lucky timing, arriving by grabbed chance in high society when there were relatively few taste-setters.

His taste for glitter, however, went back to his childhood. He was the son of Mark Lane, a big-time dealer in car and truck parts in Detroit, and Beatrice (nee Holinstat), who was an indulgent mother; his early memories were of movie-going, afterwards drawing Mae West ablaze in diamante, and imagining decors centred round a crystal chandelier. The dandified lad was taken to peek at smart Chicago, and sent on the liner Queen Mary to see Europe.

He slipped away from the University of Michigan to Manhattan, where, via introductions in bars, he landed an internship at Vogue under the art director Alexander Liberman, an experience that bored him. Back on the Michigan campus, he met the poet Frank O’Hara, who fell in love with Lane. O’Hara shared the younger man’s passions for visual art, music and literature, and introduced him to the New York arts scene.

Lane transferred to Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, the city that was for a century the centre of US costume jewellery manufacture, not that Lane noticed that then. After graduation, he took the first plausible New York-based job, designing for the the shoe company Genesco, which had a deal to reproduce Paris models by Roger Vivier, the designer for Christian Dior. Lane did the practical work so sympathetically that he was invited to become Vivier’s assistant in Paris for six months of the year. There, issued with a Genesco charge card, he was dinner host to tastemakers far richer than himself.

The cross-over came in the early 1960s, when he put rhinestones on shoes for a designer show and suggested earrings to match, and then jewelled buttons. Easy to make, they were even easier to sell, first to the buyers in New York department stores, where jewellery counters, like cosmetic counters now, offered an instant new look, and then to glossy magazines. Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, avid for photographs with pizzazz, featured his baubles and mentored him. Lane regarded jewellery as a profitable hobby until 1963, when customers bought so much he had to improvise a business.

His creations, not drawn as designs but wrangled into shape, relied on the inventive techniques and small workshops then still common in Providence and Lower Manhattan. He could take a jangle of chains and claws into a cupboard-sized NYC solder shop and come out with a tiara for a fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He used cutters and moulders of glass in Germany, the then Czechoslovakia and Venice, and worked with the extruders of new plastics and resins. For aspirational inspiration, he looked to the Crown Jewels, the treasuries of baroque cathedrals, and the regalia, safely stowed in the bank, of people he knew.

Jackie Kennedy asked him to copy the Maharani necklace that Aristotle Onassis gave her, and he warned he couldn’t replicate its big rubies because “they don’t make fake stones of such bad quality”. She permitted him to produce cheaper versions for sale, and phoned him long afterwards to say she had just seen one being worn on the TV soap Dynasty. Anything might catch his eye: a lion’s head brass door-knocker from a London hardware shop was miniaturised into earrings, and to create bangles he adapted the idea of wooden shoe heels wrapped in lizard skin.

From early on he won prizes – the Coty award in 1966, the Neiman-Marcus fashion award in 1968 – and he lasted longer than his contemporaries, going down market and up in profit in the 1990s on the cable shopping channel QVC, where he was a charming salesman for pieces mass produced in China to his specifications. As department stores declined, he moved online to sell his quality line, still tinkering with the pieces enthusiastically – he liked, he said, “pragmatic fantasy” – and delving into his caches of materials no longer made. He sustained one of the last Providence workshops to put it all together.

Retrospective exhibitions brought in fresh customers, and vintage pieces now fetch high prices: his occasional knock-offs of Bulgari, Cartier, and Van Cleef and Arpels had more vigour than the valuable originals, because they were frank about vulgarity. “I’m a jeweller,” he explained, “not a mineralogist.”

Lane’s apartment in a Park Avenue mansion, where he lived for 30 years, demonstrated his deep, sure taste, and his private life in it remained just that, although he was available for decades as an “extra man” escort to two generations of those beautiful people who best displayed his wares.

In 1974 he married a British woman, Nicola Weymouth, whom he met through Andy Warhol; she is the subject of a 1974 portrait by the artist. The couple divorced in 1976.

• Kenneth Jay Lane, jeweller, born 22 April 1932; died 20 July 2017