Since a close friend pinned a Trifari brooch on her in the 1980s, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has been hooked on costume jewelry, designs made with inexpensive materials and faux gems.
“I was so charmed by the contrast between these elegant designs and these humble materials — by the color, the life, the humor,” said Ms. Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the art collector behind the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in Turin, Italy. But costume jewelry “also tells the history of the last century in America.”
With an eye to that history, she has been acquiring costume brooches, necklaces, rings and earrings ever since. (“I wear them everyday!” she said.)
Her collection is “arguably the best in the world,” said Carol Woolton, a jewelry editor and historian and the creator of the podcast “If Jewels Could Talk.” And Ms. Woolton used nearly 600 of the pieces — primarily made in the United States and dating from the 1930s to the aughts — as the basis of her new book, “Costume Jewelry,” which Taschen published this month in the United States ($125).
In the 1920s and 1930s, the couturiers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli were among the first in fashion to trade fine jewelry for the provocations and possibilities of fake. A great fan of faux pearl ropes, for example, Chanel felt that “your décolleté should not be a bank vault,” Ms. Woolton said in a recent phone interview. “You should wear what you felt like, wear what completed your look.”
And the affordable price of costume jewelry made it “deeply democratic,” she added, allowing women entering the work force to buy their own adornments. “They didn’t have to wait on men to give them jewelry.”
In the United States, the economic effects of the Depression and World War II prompted jewelry makers to use everyday materials including wood, raffia, rhinestones, Bakelite and Lucite.
The latter, for example, was an acrylic that had found application in military aircraft, but the costume jewelry brand Trifari repurposed surplus stock for brooches it called Jelly Bellies. It generally used Lucite for the midsections of animals such as the 1943 sea lion brooch, complete with a sky-blue crystal ball on the tip of its nose, that Ms. Sandretto Re Rebaudengo identified as a favorite in her collection.
The European jewelry makers who had immigrated to New York City around World War I had “picked up the fashion baton,” Ms. Woolton said. “They had the craft know-how, and they had a freer hand to experiment and to play — the limit was just your imagination.”
Hollywood also played a prominent role in the genre’s popularity, Ms. Woolton wrote in “Costume Jewelry,” with the costume jewelry house Joseff of Hollywood leasing its pieces to such productions as the 1963 film “Cleopatra” and selling its designs in department stores.
Jaci Rohr, a retired jewelry archivist at Paramount and a board member of the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, said the industry “still affects how the costume jewelry winds blow.” She referred to the fictional Heart of the Ocean necklace in “Titanic,” which was licensed as well as unofficially copied, and the Afrofuturistic pieces designed by Douriean Fletcher for the “Black Panther” films. (Some of Ms. Fletcher’s designs are on display at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City through March 15.)
Ms. Rohr said she also was reminded of the costume jewelry brooches worn by Madeleine Albright during her service as U.S. secretary of state: “Her pins were overtly political and stated a message to whomever she was meeting. That’s part of the history, too.”
The post Telling the Story of Costume Jewelry appeared first on New York Times.
