Jewelry Lovers

Very quickly novelty and trinket manufacturers began to produce copies of couturier costume pieces, which developed the market for fashion jewelry. America, in particular, was well placed to apply the new manufacturing techniques to the jewelry field, and where Paris had led the trend for costume jewelry, it was America that chiefly propagated it. Less hide-bound by craft traditions than the European countries, and less inhibited by old bureaucracies and stylistic inertia, America was undergoing full-scale industrialization.

In the jewelry field America ceased simply to import or copy European role models and began to experiment with new technologies and materials of its own, to the extent that jewelry manufacture rapidly became a major industry. The New York Times pointed out (ironically, since this was the year of the Wall Street Crash): ‘Our jewelry industry has attained a position of economic dignity and importance.’ Companies along the length of the East Coast, from New York City to Providence, Rhode Island, such as Napier and Co., were involved in jewelry production. They made silver giftware and also supplied jewelry props to Hollywood movie productions such as the Ziegfeld Follies show, Samson and Delilah, and The Ten Commandments. Lightness and simplicity were the qualities aspired to, and new materials came into their own, particularly plastics.

Plastic jewelry

The widespread introduction of synthetic plastics during the 1920s marked the beginning of jewelry that was affordable to the masses. Even though plastic in the early twenties was not yet a particularly cheap material, plastic jewelry did not have the couturier name attached to it which enhanced the prices of other costume jewelry. In addition, manufacturers at this stage began importing cheaper materials to combine with the plastic pieces, such as stones and crystal beads from Czechoslovakia, France and Germany, excellent fake pearls from Japan and glass mosaic from Italy.

Plastic was a material ideally suited to machine production and to the new clean- cut, geometric Art Deco styles. As Pulos says in The American Design Ethic, ‘The action of instruments and machines was essentially geometric, as were the forms of the materials‘. Plastic could be easily moulded into sharply defined shapes and it offered the possibility of ‘mathematical precision and purity of finish’.

One well-known exponent of Art Deco plastic jewelry was an American, George F. Berklander from Providence, Rhode Island. He produced bar pins studded in rhinestone (which was very popular during this period). It is likely that he developed the first cellulose acetate flower pins as well as ‘celluloid elephant chains for the wives of Presidents Harding and Coolidge: and tiny celluloid airplanes with Lindbergh’s name on them’.

To start with, there was debate as to whether jewelry, with its ancient craft traditions, ought to take on such entirely different contemporary materials and production methods, but inevitably it did adapt to its history.

The development of synthetic plastics had begun in the late nineteenth century when they were seen as substitutes for more expensive natural materials such as horn, ivory and tortoiseshell. Several different types were produced such as Cellulose (1867), Casein (1897) and Bakelite (1907). However it was not until the 1920s that plastics were developed which were sufficiently practical to mould and colour to be of real use in jewelry making. As soon as such plastics did become available manufacturers started to produce large quantities of beads, bangle bracelets and moulded pins with a variety of different finishes from mottled to pearlized effects. Pearl imitations were mass-produced from the mid-1920s.

Bakelite had been used commercially from 1910, primarily as an insulator for electrical goods. It was Reicholds in the USA who first used it, under the name of Catalin, for the. manufacture of costume jewelry. It was light, warm, virtually indestructible and extremely well suited to the imitation of a number of different substances, particularly pearls. From the late 1920s onwards it could be produced in more sophisticated colours, was given a better lustre, and could be marbled in ways that did not fade in sunlight. Its refractive properties were excelled only by the diamond and it made an excellent substitute for jade, cornelian and goldstone. It was not just an inferior imitation of natural materials, but had many qualities unique to itself.

On the whole, novelty plastic jewelry was purchased by those who were looking for cheerful, but inexpensive items. It did not achieve the relative cachet that Chanel had brought to certain other types of costume jewelry.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
America and Mass- produced Jewelry, Plastic Jewelry