Kenneth Jay Lane, the designer and bon vivant who built a global business from glittering acts of unabashed deception, producing fake and junk jewellery – or, as he liked to say, tongue in cheek, "faque" and "junque" – has died at his home in Manhattan aged 85.

"I myself am a fabulous fake," Lane once said. The son of an automotive parts supplier from Detroit – or "Day-twah," as he would pronounce it with a wink – he was indeed one of his own most striking creations.

He came to be regarded as the first American jewellery designer to make it not only acceptable but also chic to wear fake jewellery, and in reaching that plateau he transformed himself into a high-society, jet-setting businessman with a lifestyle that was anything but cheap.

Darkly handsome in his glory years, always suave and impeccably tailored, Lane unapologetically wanted the best of everything – from the luxurious duplex apartment in a Stanford White mansion on Park Avenue to a coveted place on the "A" guest lists for all the best parties everywhere, be they in the United States, England, France, Italy or Spain. (The occasional blowout soiree in Morocco or Egypt also had him on a jet.)

It was a persona that began forming when he fell in love with fashion as a boy; he once took an after-school job just so he could buy a camel's-hair coat, and when he had earned the equivalent of the price tag, he quit. Soon, still a teenager, he left Detroit altogether, bent on a design career, and found his way to New York. To his languid Midwestern voice he soon added a slightly British overtone, acquired at the same time that he discovered British tailors, to whom he was devoted the rest of his life.

The wider public knew him from his frequent appearances on QVC, the home shopping network, where his company made a fortune in sales. He often gave viewers a glimpse of his glamorous world and advised them how to wear the different ornaments he peddled.

Lane was self-deprecatingly realistic about his designing talent. "My designs are all original," he told The New York Times in 2014. "Original from someone."

His name became so synonymous with fake jewellery that it was even invoked, unflatteringly, in the Lou Reed song Sally Can't Dance, about a New York fashion model's rise and fall.

Lane's customers and friends throughout the years included some of the world's richest, most publicised and most fashionable women – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, Nancy Reagan, the princesses Margaret and Diana, Babe Paley and Diana Vreeland among them.

Through many of them, Lane became one of the most in-demand escorts of single and married women – wives whose husbands refused to accompany them to some of the sparkling parties they enjoyed.

Lane was born in Detroit on April 22, 1932, and graduated from Detroit Central High School. A budding interest in design led him to the University of Michigan, where he briefly studied architecture before moving on to the Rhode Island School of Design, from which he graduated in 1954.

New York Times