Jewelry Lovers

In sharp contrast with this return to safe forms of design were the avant-garde contemporary art movements, known as Dadaism and Surrealism. These movements had a considerable impact on the world of jewelry. Their ideas were embraced by designers such as Chanel’s fashion rival, Schiaparelli. In addition a number of the Dadaist and Surrealist artists themselves experimented with jewelry design, including Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Jean Clement and Jean Arp.

Dali designed a pair of telephone earrings as well as necklaces made from locks, clips and paperweights in Plexiglas. Clement’s passion thermometers indicated a lover’s temperament.

Surrealism considered the whole spectrum of human activity. It was concerned with the unconscious mind and the power of dreams. The Surrealist artists were interested in how the imagination could be harnessed and expressed in the most ‘primitive state’. Aesthetically, this resulted in the recording of dream images with strong Freudian (sexual) undertones and visual puns.

Schiaparelli came up with some of the most extraordinary Surrealist jewelry designs during the thirties and forties. These included a vinyl collar, embedded with multi-coloured metal insects, a pink ice cube necklace, buttons in the form of musical notes, hatchet- and heart-shaped brooches and diamond-studded false finger nails. These strong visual statements expressed the Surrealist movement’s contempt for convention.

Surrealism reached its peak at the Paris Exhibition of 1936 with a range of bizarre items on display, from lantern-lit jewelry to glassless spectacles. They were admired by the social and fashionable elite of this period including Mae West and Mrs Reginald Fellows.

Chanel and costume jewelry

The gradual introduction of costume jewelry in the early twentieth century is clearly associated with the more functionalist and modernist style. By the eve of the First World War, elaborate and delicate jewelry characteristic of the Edwardian period was replaced by much larger and simpler pieces.

Seasonal costume jewelry finally came into its own and this owed much to the work of two influential fashion designers of the period, Gabrielle Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. They removed the stigma of wearing fake jewels, from items of pure imitation to the celebration of ’stylishness … and nonchalant luxury’.

Chanel is important, not only because she ‘invented’ costume jewelry, but also because she used these unusual designs to complement her own fashion collections. She believed that the concept of ‘fake’ should be used as a symbol of confidence for the new independent woman of the twenties, since the wearing of precious jewelry was looked down as being frivolous and unpatriotic, particularly after the war.

New fashions in dress design also demanded a different kind of function in jewelry. Long lengths of pearl robe, glass beads or sautoirs accentuated long, lean lines and sleeveless evening dresses left arms uncovered to be decorated in numerous bangles.

Costume jewelry was not only influenced by biannual fashion changes, but also contemporary art movements, including the work of individuals such as Picasso, Am and Braque, who also designed jewelry themselves. They developed a taste for ethnic fashions, epitomised by Nancy Cunard’s huge ’slave’ bangles in African ivory.

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Dadaism and Surrealism: Chanel and Costume Jewelry