For the longest time, Tini Courtney, the founder of the fine jewelry brand HOWL, which stands for Handle Only With Love, disliked pearls. “I never appreciated them — grandma vibes,” she admitted.
But in early 2023, Ms. Courtney’s husband, Amir Yakira, persuaded her to give pearls a try. “I’d made him a gold ball bracelet and he wanted to switch out one of the links with a pearl,” Ms. Courtney, who lives in Los Angeles, said. “He went downtown and found an amazing guy, a third-generation pearl family, and got me a few pearls to play around with. That sparked a whole new wave of creativity for me.
“Before, I couldn’t wrap my head around pearls design-wise because my work is so chunky and bold,” she added. “I always thought I had to put them on a string, and didn’t realize I could do them my own way.”
Royal Renegade, the gold-forward jewelry collection featuring white Akoya and South Sea cultured pearls that Ms. Courtney introduced in May, could easily be a prime example of what some people in the jewelry industry have been calling the “pearl renaissance.” (Akoya pearls are produced by the Akoya oyster, the Pinctada fucata martensii; South Sea pearls, produced by the Pinctada maxima oyster, are found in southern seas, including the South Pacific and parts of the Indian Ocean.)
Many pearl lovers point out that the gems have never gone out of style, but until recently such up-and-coming designers as Ms. Courtney largely ignored them.
“There was a time in the early years of the 21st century when people were trying to reinvent pearls and make them cool,” said Marion Fasel, a jewelry historian, author and the founder and editorial director of the online jewelry publication The Adventurine. “But this constant gravitational pull toward pearls has finally had a breakthrough and funnily enough, like so many trends right now, it kind of smashed the headlines when all the men started wearing them.”
Ms. Fasel cited the influence of pearl devotees such as Harry Styles, Marc Jacobs and Joc Pederson, who, as a right fielder for the Atlanta Braves baseball team, wore a strand of white pearls on the field during the 2021 World Series. She also pointed to the growing selection of pearl jewels in risk-taking styles.
Take the Tiffany Titan collection, which Pharrell Williams — the multihyphenate singer, producer and creative director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear — designed for Tiffany & Company. Introduced in September, the line juxtaposes luminous white freshwater pearls with high polished gold and diamonds in designs featuring a spear motif inspired by the Greek god Poseidon and his trident.
“I’ve always been intrigued by pearls,” Mr. Williams wrote in an email. “The spear is bold and fearless, and the pearls are soft and precious, but they fit perfectly together. They almost look as if they are protecting each other.”
Victoria Reynolds, Tiffany’s chief gemologist and vice president of global merchandising, traced the retailer’s love affair with the organic gems back to its founding in 1837. More recently, she said, the house added pearls to its Tiffany HardWear collection in 2019 and again in 2022.
“The challenge with the pearl is, it’s something so simple, how do you make it new?” Ms. Reynolds said.
For a pearl specialist such as Mikimoto, the Japanese brand recognized for creating the world’s first cultured pearl in 1893, the answer lay partly in a fresh approach to styling.
Last month, the Japanese jeweler unveiled a new collaboration with the rock ’n’ roll luxury brand Chrome Hearts: a fine jewelry capsule featuring 11 core pieces, including a safety pin brooch, charm bracelet, pendant necklaces and drop and stud earrings.
It was the latest move in the company’s effort to make pearls appeal to everyone, beginning with its 2020 collaboration with the Japanese fashion brand Comme des Garçons on a collection of silver chain necklaces strung with Akoya and South Sea pearls. (The advertising campaign featured a young man in a classic suit and tie, wearing a double strand pearl necklace.)
That partnership “underscored pearls’ versatility, helping to drive a shift in the pearl industry’s perception from classic to contemporary, and inspiring a more progressive approach across the industry,” Kentaro Nishimura, the chief operating officer at Mikimoto America, wrote in an email.
Pearls Down Under
Paspaley, the Australian pearl farmer and retailer considered by many jewelers to be one of the most trusted names in pearling, also has “benefited from the resurgence in the popularity of pearls,” according to James Paspaley, the company’s chief executive.
Demand has been so strong that this year Paspaley began to sell its pearl jewels outside of Australia for the first time, arranging wholesale partnerships with a handful of leading multibrand retailers in the United States. The brand also has committed to opening its own retail stores in America.
“We’ve got 10 locations here in Australia,” he said. “So my next choice is Hobart, in Tasmania, or Canberra. And not to be mean to Hobart, but I’m a little more excited about the possibility of being on Rodeo Drive.”
Reflecting on why demand for pearls has risen among both consumers and designers who never had previously considered them, Mr. Paspaley offered an explanation: “If you look to the age of the people who are influencing those fields, and look at what’s important to them, they believe in things like sustainability, ethical sourcing. And if those are your beliefs, then a pearl is the gem for you.”
Pamela Cloud felt much the same way, which is why, in 2022, she founded Roseate, a pearl-centric fine jewelry brand that only uses pearls purchased directly from farmers she has personally vetted, including South Sea pearls and mother-of-pearl from Paspaley; Akoya pearls from Kakuda, a 93-year-old company with headquarters in Ise, Japan; and Tahitian pearls from Kamoka Pearl on the Ahe Atoll of French Polynesia. (While Tahitian pearls are named for Tahiti, they are farmed throughout French Polynesia.)
As Ms. Cloud, who spent 25 years in business and merchandising at Tiffany & Company, said recently, “When customers are trying to understand sustainability better, these farmers have such amazing stories to tell.”
Gems of Tahiti
In January, Ms. Cloud visited Ahe and met with Josh Humbert and Celeste Brash, the husband and wife who, along with Mr. Humbert’s father, own Kamoka, one of the oldest Tahitian pearl farming businesses in the region.
On a phone call in October, Mr. Humbert shared the story of how his family got into the business: He was 2 years old in 1973 when his parents sailed to Ahe from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. His father explored various careers, from fish running to cabinet making, before obtaining a maritime concession, in 1991, to build a pearl farm on Ahe, Mr. Humbert said.
The industry began to boom in the mid-1990s, as jewelers grew enamored of Tahitian pearls and drove up prices. Also known as black pearls, they derive their coloration, which ranges from light gray to midnight black, from the Pinctada margaritifera, or black-lip, pearl oyster.
“It was just like the gold rush in California,” Mr. Humbert said. “A lot of people made a lot of money in a short period of time. They were buying boat motors and Jet Skis and flying from the atoll weekly just to go partying in Tahiti. The scene on the plane would be fun — you’d be with all your pearl farmer friends and somebody would buy Champagne.”
The business experienced its ups and downs, until the pandemic kick started another boom, helped along, according to Ms. Brash, by social media videos that she and their 26-year-old son, Tevai, have posted.
“He’s done these pearl videos with millions of views,” Ms. Brash said. “‘Pearls don’t come from a grain of sand — here’s how we farm them out of a lagoon.’”
Kamoka now has more than 660,000 followers on Instagram, 1.6 million on TikTok and 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube. “We were kind of plodding along and now we’re trying to keep up with demand,” Ms. Brash said. “We’ve experienced almost 10 times growth in the past year.”
Demand for Tahitian pearls, in general, has risen markedly in recent years, appearing to peak in the second half of 2023 after a Chinese actress and influencer named Ni Ni posted a series of selfies showing off a Tahitian pearl strand and other pearl jewels.
“Suddenly everyone had to have Tahitian pearls,” Mr. Humbert said. “Wholesalers would come to auction and buy all the Tahitian pearls before the auction even started.”
The craze was most pronounced at the 2023 Jewellery & Gem World Hong Kong show, the pearl trade’s most important fair, said Jeremy Shepherd, the president and chief executive of PearlParadise.com, a pearl jewelry e-retailer in Los Angeles. It “was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” he wrote in an email. “South Sea and Tahitian prices were stratospheric and resellers — almost exclusively from the Chinese mainland — were frenzy buying and literally cleaning out the entire show.”
While demand has cooled over the past year, interest in Akoya, South Sea and Tahitian pearls has been steadily rising at a time when supplies have been compromised by various factors, chiefly pandemic-related delays in the culturing process but also longer-term issues such as the aging population of pearl farmers in Japan and the increased acidity of ocean waters, which affects the ability of oyster shells to produce quality pearls.
As a result, over the past five years, wholesale prices for Akoya and South Sea pearls have almost doubled and retail prices, also affected by the rising cost of gold, have risen nearly 50 percent, said Michael Hakimian, the chief executive of Yoko London, a fine jewelry manufacturer in London that has been in business since 1973.
“During Covid, things became very difficult because, obviously, everything stopped,” Mr. Hakimian said. “Now, the difficulty is managing to buy enough high-quality pearls to satisfy the demand.”
At PearlParadise.com, a strand of 10 millimeter by 12 millimeter fine Tahitian pearls now retails for about $14,000, compared with a price of about $10,000 in 2019, and a strand of 12 millimeter by 14 millimeter fine white South Sea pearls now costs about $24,000, compared with a price of about $16,000 in 2019, according to Mr. Shepherd.
Laurent E. Cartier, the co-founder of the Sustainable Pearls Project, an international research initiative focused on responsible pearl farming, said the surge in demand and subsequent rise in prices for saltwater pearls has drawn attention to the fundamental difference between pearls and other gemstones.
“In the diamond industry, everything seems to be measured in terms of demand. But in pearls, the supply side is important as well,” Dr. Cartier said in a recent interview. “Throw in a big typhoon, algae or pollution and you can basically get rid of a year’s harvest. There’s a vulnerability there.”
That quality is precisely what drew Sophie Bille Brahe, a fine jeweler in Copenhagen, to the gems in 2013, when she introduced her first pearl collection.
“I actually never liked pearls,” Ms. Brahe said last month. “Of course, I loved the beauty of a pearl, but it was never something I thought of working with. When I gave birth to my son, my mom gave me a pearl necklace that she got from my dad when I was a baby. I put it on and thought, ‘I’m never going to wear it.’
“But I had it lying close to me, my son and my work, and for me there was the same magic touch as having a child — that nature creates something so beautiful and so precious,” she added. “Pearls have always been loved and maybe I was just lucky to be among the first to think it was time to love them again.”
The post Pearls Have Acquired a New Luster Among Young Designers appeared first on New York Times.
