Adorning Fashion

Costume jewelry is commonly understood to mean fashionable yet affordable adornments made from non-precious material. Originating in in mid-1700s France with the rise of the bourgeoise, the earliest ‘costume jewelry’ mimicked fine jewelry styles. Since then, costume jewelry has always been evolving. From Victorian sentimentalism to the mass-produced ornaments available today, costume jewelry has developed into an artform in its own right. An encyclopedic study of its history is long overdue. Flush with expert information, identification tips and historical anecdotes, Adorning Fashion explores the development of costume jewelry across the past four centuries. The styles of each era – Victorian, Edwardian, Arts & Crafts, Jugenstil, Art Nouveau, and each decade of the twentieth century – are given individual attention. Production methods are also explained in depth. Alloys and gilded electroplating can mimic silver and gold, while the refraction index of treated glass can, to the untrained eye, be mistaken for diamond. Adorning Fashion discusses the contributions of a remarkable roster of designers and innovators, including Kokichi Mikimoto, Arthur L. Liberty, Carlo Giuliano, René Lalique, Elizabeth Bonté, the Castellani brothers, Jean Fouquet, Jean Després, Fulco di Verdura, Jean Schlumberger, Salvador Dalí, Miriam Haskell, Lina Baretti, Countess Cissy Zoltowska, Line Vautrin, Kenneth Jay Lane, Francisco Rebajes, Diane Love, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel, Van Cleef & Arpels, Paco Rabanne, Yves Saint Laurent, Napier, Haskell, Trifari, Brania, Bulgari, Versace and more.