Jewelry Lovers

During the Flower Power era, the renewed interest in Asia and the Far East led to a return to natural materials such as bone, ivory and Indian metalwork. Western jewelers were influenced by the varied assortment of goods being imported from Asia, and leather thong jewelry hung with dyed feathers and wooden beads typified the ethnic style of this period.

In addition, the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement focused attention on African decorative arts. Janis Joplin, the well-known singer and songwriter of the seventies made ethnic jewelry her signature. Men and women pierced their ears to wear hooped earrings.

Anti-Vietnam feeling helped fuel the Peace movement. Patriotic and jingoistic jewelry of the kind produced during and after the Second World War was now replaced with more sentimental motifs, and emotive symbols of peace.

Couturiers and jewelry houses took up the Flower Power iconography in a variety of ways. Dior, Chanel, Cartier and Givenchy each had their own version of the jeweled flower.

In keeping with the mood of the time, jewelry was both casual and restrained. It had become chic to reduce ornamentation to a minimum, and was considered vulgar to be too ostentatious. The hand-crafted and ethnic nature of the seventies’ jewelry was an expression of anti-materialist values. In this sense it was the jeweler’s equivalent of the political slogans that were adorning the fashions of the time.

In Britain, the costume jewelers, Nick Butler and Simon Wilson were particularly influential in the field of reproduction antique jewelry at this time. They revived early twentieth-century Bakelite and paste jewelry.

Street Styles and Jewelry Design

Pop Art motifs continued to be incorporated into costume jewelry. Mickey Mouse badges had been popularized by the designer Mick Milligan in London, who was commissioned by the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, to produce accessories for her collections throughout the 1970s. Experiments with cheap materials also continued, and by the mid-eighties the market had been literally saturated with plastic and other non-precious materials.

The liberalizing of attitudes and abandonment of strict codes that had begun in the sixties had led to a general lack of design restraints. High street jewelers went into a frenzy of activity in all sorts of directions. Many used precious materials, even gold, in informal, badly worked and inappropriate ways so they looked like molten lumps. Unsurprisingly, this casual, undisciplined style was not on the whole of interest to the artist-jewelers. However, an exception was John Donald, who did successfully produce some fine jewelry based on this informal street style.

A more widely influential street fashion was the Punk movement which took hold in London in 1977. Punks festooned themselves with so-called ‘creative salvage’ in the form of safety pins, nuts and bolts, bones, lavatory paper and rubber tyre tubing. The style spread beyond Britain, and for a brief period left its mark on the jewelry market. One jeweler who became closely involved with punk fashion was the Irishman, Tom Binns. He collaborated on a series of Vivienne Westwood’s collections in London, including ‘Witches and Fluorescent Savages’ and ‘Punkature’. Setting a trend for jewelry makers to work directly with avant-garde fashion designers, he has also worked with Comme des Garcons and Rifat Ozbek.

From America, a fashion for ‘club culture’ exotica spread across the Atlantic. This amalgam of styles included rubber fetishist jewelry which was taken up by numerous fashion designers such as Anthony Price and John Galliano.

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