It wasn’t enough that her knit top was shot through with silver threads. When Jill Stolicker of Camarillo got dressed to attend a Museum of Ventura County lecture called “Baubles and Bangles: How to Collect Vintage Bling,” she loaded up on the sparklies.
She pinned two glittering, feather-shaped rhinestone brooches to her top, just below her left shoulder. She linked a bracelet of rhinestone baguettes around her wrist and fastened a pair of dangly sparklers to her ear lobes. Then she clipped two small bows fashioned from rhinestones to her shoes.
“My grandmother gave them to my aunt, and I got them from her,” Stolicker said of her collection of costume jewelry. “There’s nothing valuable, just precious.”
This time next week, movie stars will walk the Academy Awards’ red carpet wearing designer gowns paired with all manner of borrowed jewelry, some new, some vintage, all of it heavy on the carats and karats. But for museum speaker Rita Faulders, those queen-for-a-day riches can’t compare to the family treasures tucked away in jewelry boxes like Stolicker’s.
“For a long time, because of the cycles of fashion, these things were hidden away,” Faulders said. “But the whole idea of bling is to show off. I think we should start wearing these things again.”
Many of the more than 70 people attending Faulders’ lecture last weekend at the museum took those words — and the invitation to bring two pieces for show and tell — to heart.
For every cameo, pearl necklace and rhinestone earring they laid out on the bring-and-brag table for Faulders’ perusal, they wore several more at their necks and wrists, hanging from their ears and/or pinned to their clothing.
Seated to Stolicker’s left was Joy Berger of Ventura, who had attached a glittering circle of 1940s-era Eisenberg Ice inherited from her aunt to her burgundy jacket.
A few rows back, Adrienne Goldbaum of Oxnard showed Joyce Goldstein of Oak Park two garage-sale finds of which she is particularly proud: a silver necklace threaded with lozenges of butterscotch amber, and a hinged bracelet made of polished wood and Bakelite, a highly collectible plastic.
Blinded by the light
Standing at a lectern at the front of the room, Faulders blinked several times, as though momentarily blinded by the almost audible sparkling of the audience.
“I wish you could all see yourselves,” she said, laughing. “I’m seeing enamel, Bakelite, coral. “
But on this day, Faulders planned to focus on cameos, pearls and rhinestones, a topical trio that proved so attractive that a waiting list was started for overflow reservations.
Unable to nab a seat in the Huntsinger Gallery, one woman sent in a pair of tiny cameos via a museum staff member. Faulders held them up for the audience to see as she described the solid backing on the cameos as an indication that they had been crafted from molded glass or plastic rather than carved from a stone or seashell.
Faulders became interested in the history of the decorative arts — a subject that includes not just jewelry but tea cups and Tiffany lamps — when she was curator of the Estelle Doheny collection of rare books and manuscripts at what is now St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo.
After leaving that post in 1988, she was a volunteer docent assigned to cataloging gifts at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley. She now lectures for Elderhostel programs in Ventura and Santa Barbara and offers regularly scheduled talks about collecting at locations such as the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park.
During her vintage bling lecture in Ventura, Faulders referred to cameos as “miniature sculptures” and detailed how the wearable works of art began as coins stamped or carved with the profiles of early Romans.
The first cameos typically were worn on a heavy chain around the neck, she said. Later, cameos were carved from such materials as onyx, agate and seashells.
Pinned to a blouse or onto a ribbon worn around the neck, “cameos went out of fashion in the 1950s and ’60s and came back again with the trend for granny dresses in the 1970s,” Faulders added. “If you ask me, they’re due for a revival.”
Pearls also have experienced the changing whims of time and fashion, she said.
Created when an irritant such as a grain of sand works its way into an oyster or mussel, pearls originally were harvested in the wild, Faulders said. They were the favored adornments of 16th-century royalty, who “wore as many pearls as they could manage.”
Today, she added, most gem-quality pearls are the cultured variety. An irritant is purposefully inserted into the mollusk, which is then placed in a cage for protection and left in the water to grow over a period of several years, depending on the desired size.
Whereas medieval monarchs had pearls sewn all over their clothing, Faulders noted, modern-day pearls may be strung onto necklaces with long “tails” hanging from the center — the better to go spelunking into low necklines.
Fabulous fakes
Rhinestone jewelry almost revels in its flashy fakery. But the fact that the pieces are made with glass or “paste” rather than diamonds and precious stones doesn’t mean that they aren’t valuable, Faulders said.
Vintage pieces stamped with the names of manufacturers such as Bogoff, Eisenberg, Schiaparelli and Miriam Haskell are particularly coveted by collectors, she noted.
(How coveted? Faulders declined to appraise pieces at the event. But bidding for a signed, Schiaparelli brooch-and-earrings set recently bypassed the $157 mark on the online auction site eBay.)
The word “rhinestone” may have been inspired by the proximity of the early cut-glass stone industry to the river Rhine, Faulders said.
After some hesitancy by consumers, rhinestone jewelry got a major push courtesy of designer Coco Chanel. In the 1920s, she became one of the first couturiers to include what would become known as costume jewelry in her collections, pairing her trademark tweed suits with ropes of pearls and chains and decorating her little black dresses with pins and buttons studded with colored glass.
After riding a glittering wave of popularity through the early 1960s, rhinestone jewelry largely disappeared, replaced by macrame knots and natural materials favored in the 1970s, Faulders said.
“If your mother wore rhinestones, are you going to wear rhinestones, especially when you’re running around in granny dresses and overalls?” she asked with a laugh.
Rhinestones staged a comeback in the ’80s, and could be ready to cycle through again, Faulders added. To illustrate the point, she held up a recent newspaper advertisement showing a model with a large, jeweled pin at the waist of her dress.
Fashion pendulum aside, audience members like Stolicker were just happy to have an excuse to flaunt their vintage rhinestones in public.
The lecture was “exactly the sort of thing they would have liked to do,” Stolicker said of the women who passed their sparklies on to her. “Except, my aunt would have worn everything in her jewelry box.”
Things to know about your vintage jewelry
When it comes to caring for vintage jewelry, there’s one, one-size-fits-all rule: Never submerge them in jewelry cleaner.
“You never know what sorts of glues are holding them together, or how the metals and stones will react to the cleaner,” Rita Faulders said.
Read on for her tips on collecting, period-dating and caring for three specific types of jewelry.
Cameos
You can tell a lot about a cameo by turning it over and looking at its back, Faulders said.
Is the back solid metal? Chances are that the cameo was molded from plastic or glass and then glued into the metal mounting.
If the backing looks more like a hollow frame through which you can see the cameo itself, hold the piece up to the light. A translucent cameo may have been carved from a stone like agate. A translucent cameo with a pinkish glow may have been carved from a conch or similar seashell.
Among older cameos, the hairstyle and mode of dress of the subject can offer clues to the age of the piece. Tumbling, curly locks and an elaborate neckline could point to the Art Nouveau period of the late 1890s and beyond; a more severe hairdo with no ornamentation at the neck could indicate an earlier period.
A cameo rendered in black may date to the 1860s, an era marked by the American Civil War and the death of England’s Prince Albert. According to the social codes of the day, women in mourning were not permitted to wear color, even in their jewelry.
In general, the more filigree on the frame, the more valuable the piece.
Pearls
Because they are organic matter, real pearls should never be sealed in plastic bags or air-tight safety deposit boxes, Faulders said.
Aside from using price as your guide, it is fairly easy to tell costume jewelry pearls from the real thing. The latter usually have a luster that is difficult to duplicate.
They also tend to be lighter in weight than ersatz pearls, which in some cases are hollow glass beads whose interiors have been coated with fish scales and then filled with wax. If all else fails, try the tooth test, Faulders said: Real pearls are coated with a substance called nacre, which will feel gritty when rubbed against your teeth.
Look for pearls strung on a knotted strand. The knots will keep the pearls from rubbing against each other — and from scattering all over the floor should the strand break.
Avoid subjecting pearls to hairspray, perfume and other cosmetics. “Pearls should go on last and come off first,” Faulders said.
Rhinestones
Rhinestone jewelry with names like Eisenberg and Schiaparelli stamped on the back tends to be more valuable than pieces from anonymous manufacturers (and, to avoid fakes, generally are best purchased from specialty dealers). But in the end, “buy what you like and then wear it,” Faulders said. Or ask family members if you can have any rhinestones that they may have forgotten in their jewelry boxes.
Store rhinestone jewelry so that the stones, pin backs and other mountings can’t scratch other pieces.
To clean rhinestone jewelry, wipe with a soft cloth.
– Lisa McKinnon
Coming
The Museum of Ventura County is planning another Baubles and Bubbles: How to Collect Vintage Bling event to take place in the summer. Its focus will be on rhinestone and Art Deco-era jewelry. For information, call 653-0323, ext. 10.
Rita Faulders also teaches classes about collectibles other than jewelry. For information about sessions taking place in Newbury Park and the Santa Rosa Valley, call 482-6863.
About bling …
“Bling,” a word that now seems synonymous with “jewelry,” has been in use for about a decade.
It started out as “bling bling,” coined in the late 1990s by the New Orleans rap alliance Cash Money Millionaires to refer to a diamond-studded lifestyle in general and to showy pieces of jewelry in particular. It gained national prominence in 1999 when an album released by CMM artist B.G. included a song titled “Bling Bling.”
In 2000, NBA championship rings presented to the Los Angeles Lakers were engraved with the words “bling bling.” The term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary three years later.
Today, most Americans who use “bling” tend to do so in the singular rather than the plural. But in December, the French newspaper Liberation dubbed leader Nicolas Sarkozy “The Bling-Bling President” because of his apparent love of expensive suits, stylish sunglasses and conspicuously large wristwatches.