Golden Guns

Protection with a touch of chic

Finally, the perfect knock-'em-dead gift for the man or woman who has everything: something to protect everything with. Not your ordinary cold steel snub nose, mind you. That would never do for kings, sultans and other mega-consumers. At Bijan's exclusive Beverly Hills boutique, where the clientele snaps up such wares as $95,000 chinchilla bedspreads and $1,500 bottles of perfume for men, self-defense means a $10,000 gold designer gun. "You don't want to be at home and have someone try to kill you," explains the Iranian-born proprietor, Bijan Pakzad. "It's protection in a chic way. To me, everyone who is rich and loves guns will want one.

"The head of a European royal family asked me to design a unique gift for a fellow monarch," Bijan adds as he darts excitedly around his store (open by appointment only). "I wanted to make something so American. I wanted to design a gun that people who hate guns would want to have and touch and play with because it's so pretty." So he had a leather handgrip fashioned for a .38-cal. Colt revolver at his workshop in Florence, inlaid the cylinder with 56 grams of 24-karat gold, and placed the gun in a mink pouch in a Baccarat crystal case embossed with the customer's name. Bijan's own signature is engraved in gold on the shank of the gun. It is the perfect accompaniment to his line of bullet-proof clothing. "Gucci," he says with evident pride, "never did gold pistols." Advertisements, which have run in such trendsheets as Interview and Town and Country, include one with a black-robed woman pointing the revolver at the reader.

So far, Bijan has sold 47 of his limited edition of 200. Among the anonymous customers: a U.S. Senator, three kings, several overseas leaders and an OPEC oil minister. Most have told him that they want the gun as a collector's item, but a few say they will use it if the need arises. Says he: "Anyone who is wealthy and powerful is a target." What next for Bijan? Well, he could always try silver bullets.

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