COSTUME JEWELRY
Identifying antique and costume jewelry: Koski, Director, Wisconsin Historical Museum Whenever I give a presentation on antique and costume jewelry, it’s often followed by a session on identifying pieces from the audience. Usually the first question I am asked is, “What is this thing anyway? This short article is to help you begin to answer some of these questions.
The first issue that needs to be addressed is the difference between antique and costume jewelry.
Napier costume jewelry from the s and early s is extremely hard to find and highly prized by both Napier enthusiasts and collectors of Art Deco jewelry. Like Ciner costume jewelry, it is often difficult to date Napier pieces simply by looking at the mark.
The show was a great success and contributed to the preservation of couture in France. The collection was restored in and went on a second tour in the early ‘s. I was fortunate to see it in the early ’90’s. In Dior introduced The New Look which changed the way women dressed. Jewelry in the late ’40’s was still mostly Retro in style, but the scale gradually changed so that the pieces, many still asymmetrical, were smaller in scale – complimenting the new more feminine fashions.
We looked at a little bit of late ’40’s Retro jewelry in Part IV. The Trifari Meteor parure is a good example. An important trend in fine jewelry, copied in costume, for the first time, was the separation of day-time and night-time jewelry. Jewelry set in goldtone finishes had colored stones but no diamonds — for day.