Hello everybody and welcome to this
youtube lecture about the history of Georgian Era jewelry. My name is Taylor
Shelby I am from Dames a la Mode. Dames a la Mode is a business I've run
for the last 10 years, where I recreate Georgian Era jewelry, so it's definitely
a passion of mine and something that I'm maybe a little bit obsessed with! But
today I thought I'd share some of my knowledge with you. And today i'm going to share some information about Georgian jewelry.
We're going to go over some of the styles, some of the materials,
and just give you a familiarization with the things that you're looking at when
you're looking at portraits that will help you make better decisions
about the jewelry that you're going to be wearing in your own costuming
or just for information! whatever! This will be a powerpoint presentation
so i'm going to get my computer all set up and we'll switch the screens over so
you can see what i'm seeing on my computer screen.
All right so let's go ahead and get started with the powerpoint presentation.
I'm sharing my screen now so you can see exactly what I'm looking at.
So when we're talking about the Georgian era we're technically talking about
1714 to 1830. That's the technical era of the rules of the kings George, but we
really have three distinct fashion and jewelry groupings. And the
first one is the 1720s to the 1780s. I'm going to sort of call this the "18th
century" as shorthand, even though obviously I'm not
encompassing the entirety of the 18th century.
Because prior to the 1720s you're really looking at stuff that was back into the
17th century and by the time you get to the 1790s
you're sort of moving forward in fashion a little bit.
So from about 1720 to 1780 you have a more cohesive style of jewelry that
we're talking about. So throughout this presentation i'll
refer to the 18th century, but when I say that i'm really excluding
the 1790s because i'm going to include those in
the regency period. So even though the regency is not really
from the 1790s to the 1810s, when i'm talking about fashion and
styling that's what i'm going to use as a shorthand for that period from the 1790s
into the 1810s. And as you get into the 1820s and into
1830 you're really in sort of a pre-victorian
era so the styles that you're seeing in this 1820s are moving forward in
fashion a little bit to something that's coming into the
future. So i'll talk about that a little bit,
but primarily we're going to be talking about, um, really more
jewelry from about the 1720s to about the 1820s.
So here's sort of the ideas of the clothing that we're talking about. This
is what i want you to put in your head when i'm talking about
the 18th century: we see madame pompadour here
in her very classically 18th century clothing.
Here we see Caroline Bonaparte who's in you know this sort of
Grecian style regency wear. And then as we get into the 1820s and 1830s we're
really starting to see this more extreme style of fashion that we associate with
the Victorian era. So I do want to make a note about the
pictures and images that i'm using in this presentation.
These are going to be primarily consisting of portraiture of
and objects that are representative of wealthy, white
elites from Europe and colonial and then federal era English north america.
This is just sort of the people who i'm focusing on this presentation because
they have the most elaborate jewelry. My areas of study have not focused on
really any other group in depth so I don't feel like i'm qualified to
talk about that. You can make some logical inference
of the styles of jewelry and adornment that would have been
worn by poorer classes of people, but for the most part since we're talking about
jewelry we're going to be focusing on the wealthiest group of people who are
available in the western world. So let's first start by talking about
jewelry materials and the primary one I want to talk about
is "paste" because this is always the one that throws people off!
Paste is a synthetic stone. Today what we consider rhinestones or
crystals is what they would have considered
paste in the Georgian era. Now rhinestones are actually a real thing
they are stones that come from the river Rhine
that had a certain gemological makeup that made them slightly more sparkly and
more beautiful when they were cut. So rhinestones were a, uh, diamond
substitute. Now in the 1730s an Austrian man named
Georges Strass invented what was called paste
and this is basically leaded glass just like our crystals are today,
and that was used to replicate gemstones. The lead content of the glass is really
important because the lead is what makes it a little bit more sparkly and able to
refract the light a little bit better. So he invented that. We don't
really know where the terminology paste comes from but
there's some suspicion that basically these were made by
combining sand and lead into, sort of like, a paste-
like material and then that would have been
melted down and cast into the shapes of the gemstones
that then could have been cut or faceted and used in jewelry.
So I use paste and rhinestone and crystal interchangeably because in our
modern world they're all basically the same thing,
but they were actually distinctive things in the Georgian era.
But most of the jewelry that you see from this period is going to be paste
jewelry - so not real gemstones. So paste could take on basically any color
by virtue of foiling the back of the stone. So these would have been
clear glass crystals that had foil on the back of them
that helps them be more reflective and also would add the color to them.
So these stones were either clear or dyed themselves
and then foil was added to the back of them to make the light that comes in
reflect back out and make them more sparkly, just like our rhinestones are
today. In the 18th century you typically would
have seen foiled stones and as you move into the 19th
century you start to see stones that are unfoiled where they're actually just
clear stones and they don't have that foil backing to them.
But you do see both in both periods, it's just more common in the 18th century to
see foiled stones and more common in the 19th century to
see unfoiled stones. Paste stones came in so many different
colors. They were pretty limited with the actual
real gemstones that they had access to in this period
because there weren't as many mines around the world, and
um technology hadn't gotten as good. And we also do a lot of manipulation to
our gemstones today by heating them to really high temperatures and also
irradiating them. So you can put radiation into gemstones and it causes
them to change colors and you can also super heat some
gemstones and it'll change their color makeup.
So we sort of discovered this, um, as technology has progressed with jewelry
making and gemology, um, but they really didn't have those
options in the 18th century - in the Georgian era.
They were more limited to the actual stones they were digging out of the
ground, so paste was a good way to get all sorts
of wild colors. Some of them looked like real gemstones
some of them did not look like the gemstones that were available then,
so you see a ton of variety in the colors thanks to the invention of paste.
And here just a few examples of some beautiful different colored paste stones.
You can see how much of a different variety you get in all of
these. Now they of course did use actual real gemstones too for sure, and
there were some specifically popular gemstones in this
era. Now I don't know if this is because
these are the gemstones that were more readily available.
I haven't done a lot of study on the history of mining
and and the opening up of mining areas and things like that, so i'm not sure if this was just because of availability or
certain fads, but you have several that are really
popular. The first one is garnets. Garnets were super popular
especially in the 18th century and then they become popular again in
the 19th century when you start having the fad for bohemian garnets,
but in the 18th century they also prized garments as well. Garnets are almost
exclusively foiled on the back - so these would have had that foil backing set
into the setting that the stone is on top of - and
that's because garnets are so dark that you really need something to help
lighten them up and make them a little bit more sparkly.
Amethyst was another really popular stone, particularly these
light purple amethyst. So the darker, richer amethysts that we see today
were not common in this period. They hadn't quite discovered those mines yet,
so typically amethyst would have been this lighter color. And then
topaz was another really popular stone. Now
you might recognize this pendant. This was actually owned by
Jane Austen and it's real topaz and it's kind of an unusual color of topaz. We
don't see much of this honey topaz so much anymore,
but it was really popular in the 18th century and the regency era.
We also see a lot of two stones that I think are
greatly unappreciated today, and that is citrine and peridot.
These are really common stones used in jewelry from the Georgian era.
I think they're really beautiful. I personally have a big thing for yellow,
so I really like it, and these are really common stones that you see then too.
Now of course diamonds have been popular for a long time.
They were certainly popular in this period as well but diamonds were a
little bit different in the Georgian era than what you see today.
For one thing they were rose cut so that's this style of cut here where you
see where they're sort of faceted on the top.
Gem cutting was not nearly as advanced then
as it is today. We just have better technology,
better materials, better tools so we can do some really impressive things with
gem cutting that they just couldn't do with basically what are
essentially hand powered tools like they had then so they had to do
other things. So you don't see a lot of really elaborate cuts like you do today.
You basically would have seen rose cut and that sort of thing.
They also did foil their diamonds so they would have also put the foil
backing on these. Because they couldn't be cut as easily,
they couldn't get sharp facets and the reasons that diamonds are
so beautiful and sparkly today is because they're really heavily daceted
to help reflect all that all that light. So they would have given that a little
bit of a boost by putting some foil behind their diamonds. This necklace here
was actually owned by empress Marie Louise - napoleon's wife -
and these are - would have been - the finest diamonds available
in the world and even these diamonds are foiled so it wasn't necessarily a
quality thing it was just that's what they did to make them more sparkly.
And I've seen this necklace in person! It lives right down the road from me
at the Smithsonian and it is shockingly sparkly when you see it in real life, so
i'm all for the foiling of diamonds. I think
it's a great idea! So let's now talk about some of the more
semi-precious materials - things that aren't gemstones.
So coral is one of those stones that we really associate with this period
but it really is more of a regency stone. Until the 1790s you're really only
seeing children wearing coral and it's not ever
on adult women. Soral was considered a healthy stone so
it had these sort of - i don't want to say "magical" properties - but like healing
properties so it was considered good for children to wear. As you get
into the 1790s you start to see coral being worn by
adult women as well and one thing that i want to point out
about this portrait from the 1780s as you can see she's wearing little girl
clothes but if you think about this being grown up this is also exactly what
an adult woman would wear around 1800 as well so they sort of took this idea of
the fashions of children and they kind of grew into the fashions
for adults and i think the coral jewelry was part
of that as well. And sometimes this coral could
be really simple and sometimes it could be
really elaborate as well so it wasn't necessarily
just like a simple jewelry - it could be worn
in large quantities as well for a really big impact.
And you see coral in lots of different tones -
you can see dark red coral, sort of more like medium orange coral,
and even moving into the pink coral, so there's lots of different stone
colors that were popular and lots of different corals would have been worn.
Carnelian and agates are two other semi-precious stones that you see a lot,
particularly in the regency period. And i think this probably has something
to do with this fad for sort of the the "natural look" - the simple look - so you
start to see these less sparkly stones being used more
regularly. And they're a really beautiful stone
because they're very hard grain so when they're polished they're really
shiny they have this beautiful finish on them.
And you can see sometimes they're simple and sometimes they're really elaborate
as well, so just because it is a non-sparkly
stone doesn't mean it can't be used in an
elaborate way. They were really creative. You also see some really cool natural
variegated carnelian and agate stones that almost have this look about them
like they're wood. They have really beautiful
grains to them and a lot of excellent texture and
beauty. I personally love agates I think they're way
underrepresented and under utilized in our modern day
jewelry making. These are just some really beautiful
examples we can see a lot of examples of the colors that were available here
as well as the patterns that are available in these stones.
Lapis and turquoise were two really popular stones.
Lapis really comes into its own in the regency period,
um, you start to see a lot more of it used in jewelry and that's this really
deep, rich blue stone and turquoise of course was popular in the 18th century
and into the regency period as well. One thing you
see typically with turquoise is it's often these smaller
stones so you get like this halo style or these cluster styles,
and I think that's because turquoise is pretty soft so it's hard to get
really big gemstones that were easy to work with so you do typically see it in
these more small styles. Now pearls of course! I mean
we as humans have adored pearls since the first time somebody plucked one out
of an oyster, and they were really popular in the 18th
century in the 19th century even today. I mean we'll we'll never lose our love of
pearls i don't think. So they were really popular. Now one thing
to keep in mind about pearls is that in this period any real pearls
were found pearls - they had not developed the technique for making cultured pearls
yet (that isn't coming until the very very late 19th century around the turn
of the 20th century) so any real pearl had to be hunted for,
pulled out of an oyster on a whim, or you have people who are doing pearl hunting,
but they were super rare very valuable and difficult to come by because they
weren't producing them in pearl farms like we do today. And that
means that you actually have a lot of imitation pearls. These are
really really common in this period, um, here's two examples of fake pearls.
The ones on the right here are actually pearls that were owned by Abigail Adams.
So she had this strand of blown glass pearls. Now the blown glass
pearls were referred to as "roman pearls" and these were made by
blowing little glass balls. They would often fill them with ground
up fish scales which gave them that beautiful pearly shimmer,
and they would have been filled with wax as well to give them a little bit of
stability. Now the ones on the left are something
called a "Coque de pearle" [Coke Dee Pearl] and these are basically the scooped out
insides of an oyster shell that are then filled with
wax and backed so that they're much stronger and sturdier and then they're
put into the setting. So these are both styles of fake pearls
that were worn as jewelry all the time, so when you see images like this in
history and people wearing these great big huge pearls you are almost
certainly seeing fake pearls. So these are more examples
of the Coque de Pearle style. They just didn't have humongous pearls. I
mean even today really big real pearls are incredibly
expensive, it would have been even more back then
because the only way you're getting them is luck.
You know nobody's growing these pearls so just keep in mind when you're seeing
things like this in portraiture, you're almost certainly looking at fake
pearls unless maybe you're looking at queens and empresses and stuff like that.
They might have had the real ones but maybe not even then! And this brings
up a really interesting point about fake versus real. Today
tend to value fine jewelry as one thing and
costume jewelry is something else but there was a much more blurred line
in the 18th century, uh, in the Georgian era in general.
Because so much jewelry was fake it wasn't really considered,
like, less than. And certainly real jewels were prized for being more
valuable, obviously they have inherent value to
them, but even rich people wore fake jewelry and
it wasn't like it was embarrassing or anything. Because of the labor that went
into creating the settings and everything
like that, fake jewelry was still expensive in the
18th century because you have the value of the work that's put into it,
and less the value of the materials that are put into it.
So don't think about it being sort of, like, this trick where people are
trying to be upwardly mobile and sort of fake,
you know, their value and things like that. They just didn't have the same idea
about what was real jewelry and what was fake jewelry.
People from all classes would have worn fake pearls or
paste stones - it was just something that was available to them and it was a
material that they used and it looked beautiful,
so they just used it regardless of the inherent value of the stones that were
being used. So in the 1790s as soon as, like, Grecian
and roman and classical revival start, styles start to come in. You start to see
cameos showing up. These are both cameos where
you have a carved relief or intaglios where it's actually carved
into the surface of the stone, but you basically start to see these
"picture stones" I would call them. show up in jewelry from that period.
And these basically come in with that drapey,
Grecian style that you see with the regency period and into the 1790s.
Prior to that you really don't see these as jewelry.
Another rare material and one of my absolute favorites is
"Berlin iron" and just as the name suggests
this is, in fact, made of iron! These are cast
iron pieces of jewelry. It has a really fascinating story.
Like the name suggests, it's Berlin iron it was invented in Germany.
Um they had a lot of cast iron materials and decorations and things like that
that was just kind of the style, and then they started making the jewelry
as well and during the Napoleonic wars. And the Prussian government
asked its citizens to donate all of their valuable jewelry
to be used to fund the war effort against Napoleon,
and people would turn in their jewelry and then as sort of, like,
a "you did it!" or like a souvenir they would get back a piece of
fake berlin iron jewelry to replace it. So it became, sort of, this patriotic
thing to wear it and then people just realized that it was
super beautiful and really exotic looking, so it became more popular.
You do particularly see this on the European continent and not so much in
England the united states but it's a really really
gorgeous and super unusual style. It is cast iron that's been sort of
shellacked so it has a coating on it to keep it from rusting,
so it has this sort of shine to it, but unfortunately not
a ton of Berlin iron jewelry has survived because iron is
not really a great material to use for jewelry and these little delicate pieces -
if they get damaged or rust at all - they can just crumble apart. But it's
really striking and gorgeous. Another unusual material that has another kind
of surprising name is "cut steel" and this is in fact steel jewelry. So
these are basically each one of these little, um, things that
you see here is almost like a little nail head made of steel and then each
part is cut down and faceted and it is
shockingly sparkly when you see this, particularly in like candlelight or low
light, it's incredibly beautiful. It has so much life
to it it sparkles like diamonds they're really
beautiful and it's just plain old steel! It sort of has the look of Marcasite but
it's even more sparkly, because the steel is inherently a little
bit of a lighter color. It's really gorgeous. Micro mosaics are
another fun and unusual piece of jewelry that
you particularly get in the 1790s. Now each one of these little tiles that
you see contains an image and that image is made
of tiny tiny tiny little pieces of tile each set in to create an image.
These were typically, um, sort of used as souvenir pieces so they
almost always have some sort of Grecian or Roman design to them. They
often will show ruins. So people would get these when
they were traveling to the continent and they would bring them back as sort
of souvenirs and jewelry. They're really incredible -
some of them are, i mean, they're absolute works of art they're so
beautiful and they're a really cool style. And you can still buy this kind of
jewelry in Italy today! When I was recently in Venice it was
for sale in some of the shops so this is a style that's sort of come down over
the years. Another rare material is "vauxhall
glass" this is named after the Vauxhall gardens
in London, um, which was an area of London where there were a lot of glass
factories and they made jewelry out of this glass that they created there.
The one on the left is something called "french jet" which is a variety
of vauxhall glass and french jet is basically either a red
or a black glass that's been backed on the back
that's sort of flat so it has this mirrored, super sparkly
flashy appearance to it. And here's some that
are once again they're flat on the back and
then you have the glass that's colored and then foiled so it's really
sparkly. This was pretty cheap jewelry in this time period and
not much of it has survived because they're really thin cuts of glass so
they're super fragile, but every so often you'll see a piece of
this jewelry come up and it's always really cool. It's really really sparkly
and reflective because it almost has this mirror-like quality to it where it
flashes a lot. And we also have jasperware and
Wedgwood. So this comes into popularity
sort of along with cameos and the like in the 1790s
um and this would have been that traditional sort of blue and white.
I find that this is always the jewelry style that people associate with the
Georgian era, but really it's truly a Regency style.
Remember they're not really wearing cameos and stuff in the 18th century and
this is kind of in that similar time period, but you do see this style
come into popularity along with that classical styling that you see in the
1790s. Now the metals that they used for
jewelry in this period are basically gold and silver. They didn't
really have platinum, um there weren't a lot of alloys that
were available, so you're basically going to be seeing
these two metals. You do see brass in really cheap jewelry like trade jewelry and
um jewelry that was sold sort of like, you know,
to the lower sorts, but for the most part any amount of either fine jewelry or
high-end costume jewelry that you're gonna find would have been made with
gold and silver. This is what the back of these styles of
necklaces looked like. You can see they're sort of set
into this bezel that's closed on the back,
and I especially kept this image in because I want you to pay attention to
the style of clasp. This is called a "box clasp" B-O-X
and i'll talk about that a little bit more later but this is just a great
illustration of what it looks like. You did had two
fake styles of metal that were available in this period.
the first one is what's called rolled gold and this is basically where you
have a heavy coating of gold over top of a cheaper style of metal.
It's not quite plating because it's a much thicker
plate than we can get today because today our plating is done
by electroplating so it takes a lot of technology and obviously they didn't
have those options back then. So these would basically be fused
together and then shaped into into the jewelry. And the other one is
something called"pinchbeck". So pinchbeck is named after a person
Christopher Pinchbeck, who invented this alloy um in the early
18th century. He was a clockmaker in London and he invented this alloy as
a way to decorate clocks because obviously when you have
something where you have a lot of it you're not really going to be using gold,
but you want something that's going to be prettier than brass.
So he invented this alloy, which was a combination of zinc,
and copper and it gave this really warm golden tone to it but obviously it's not
gold. Pinchback was used really commonly on things that required a lot of
material so like decorations on carriages and watch
chains um the hilts of swords uh watch cases so
things where you don't want to spend all that money
to get gold because it just costs too much, but something where you
want it to look like gold at a more affordable price.
So those are basically the only two fake materials that would have been used in
jewelry. All right now let's talk about some of
the styles of jewelry. So probably the most iconic style from
the Georgian era is the "collet necklace" and that's this style of necklace where
you have these big stones. Now a collet is just a thing that holds
another thing, so the collet is in fact the setting
that the stone is in. Now "collet necklace" is actually a
modern term. This is not what they would have called
them in the 18th century because this was just what a necklace was.
There weren't that many styles of jewelry back then so this is just
how stone necklaces were made so it was just called a necklace. You do start to
see the term "riviere necklace" as you get more into
the 19th century, but again they also just call those
necklaces. So in the 18th century necklaces are really
short because they're worn high up on the neck like this - not around your
collarbone but actually on your neck. So they would have been finished with
little loops on the ends here because they were tied
off not by using a clasp or some sort of permanent thing but by using a ribbon.
So they would be tied on so you can get the tension right so it sits in the
proper place on your neck. So when you see collet necklaces that
end in these loops you're looking at an 18th century necklace at that point. Lots
of them have been altered over the years. Obviously as the styles change and this
was not the fashionable way to do it anymore people lengthened their family
jewels, but if you see one of these original
ones with the loop you're looking at an 18th century style necklace that would
have been worn like this and tied with a ribbon in
the back. As you move into the 19th century you
start to see a longer more natural wearing of these,
so that that's when everything sort of comes down to the actual natural
collarbone. And when they made them this way they
started using those box clasps like i showed you in that
earlier slide, and this right here is actually the
clasp of the necklace so it's hidden behind
a set stone so it looks like one single piece when you look at it from
the back. You don't get a lot of jewelry innovation. It's just kind of
unusual - jewelry styles move much slower than fashion styles - but in
1794 something really exciting happens in the
jewelry world and that is festoon necklaces. So you don't really
see these at all prior to the 1790s but then in
1794 they start to show up in portraits and fashion plates. And the festoon
necklace is the style of necklace where you have these little loops
that sort of give this swagged, hanging appearance like the one that i'm wearing
right now which is made of pearls. So this is a new style of jewelry
that comes in, once again, along with that classical
revival, where things are more drapey and natural
and elegant. You start to see these styles of necklaces as well,
and if you look back into the 1780s you can see where they sort of come from.
So this is the famous Marie Antoinette necklace from the
"affair of the necklace" and you can see that there's an element
of festoon showing up in this necklace. And
the festoon style here, um, was made in the mid 1780s so
this may have been the thing that kicked off this style,
but this is the earliest example I found. And then you start seeing this in fashion plates in the 1790s so you can
definitely see where the echo of this style comes from.
And as you move into the 19th century, festoon necklaces can become
a lot more elaborate. Here you have a beautiful one set with
malachite carved cameos. These are tiny little micro mosaics of butterflies
which are just so beautiful, and these make for a really
delicate style when you're wearing them. The way that the chains swag and hang -
they're really beautiful! And then you also have really simple
festoon styles as well. I mean these are just simple little chains with a little
center stone in the middle. This is such a great style because it can be
really elaborate, it can be really simple, it basically can
work for any style that you're wearing: day wear, evening wear, anything!
I just i love these festoon style pieces of jewelry.
Now you might notice that we haven't shown that many pictures of beaded
jewelry, and that's because beaded jewelry just wasn't all that common in this
period. Now my suspicion about this - and this is
just a guess - is that it's hard to make beads if you
don't have mechanical tools. You know many stones
that we use as beads today are really hard and you really need, like, a
drill to get through them and remember that they just didn't have
access to that sort of thing in this period.
So you see beads in really limited examples.
Soft beads of soft stones like turquoise and garnet were really popular - garnet
was especially popular in the 18th century - you see
lots of these and you see turquoise throughout this whole Georgian era.
Here's another example of a really pale turquoise or possibly jasperware beads -
it's a little bit hard to say. Here we have some lapis lazuli beads
that she's wearing as earrings, as well as pearls, of course, which are
common. And then you also have this really interesting
um fad for gold beads. These show up in the late
1780s which is where these really gorgeous humongous ones are from,
and then you see this style of necklace being worn
basically then throughout history. It's especially popular in the Victorian era,
but this starts in the late 1780s. Aow when you're looking at these you're
not looking at solid gold, I mean that would be incredibly valuable. These
would have been hollow beads. And they could have been other materials
that are made to look like gold and some of them, especially the smaller ones
may be real gold but just keep in mind that you're probably
looking at some fake jewelry, especially when you have these really huge
elaborate styles like this. And that's pretty much all you're going
to be seeing for beads: coral, pearls, gold beads, turquoise
a little bit of lapis - that's still not all that common -
and garnets. There just really isn't a lot of
other um bead style jewelry that shows up and again i think that's because of
the complexity of making a bead when you're working
with hand tools basically. Especially as you get into the 1790s,
you start to see chains come into fashion. This is again
part of that whole um delicacy, swags, and this is sort of a comes from
the festoon style. Now you're not seeing big, heavy, chunky
chains but you're seeing some light delicate style jewelry that goes better
with these light delicate styles of clothing.
One thing about chains in this period is I want you to notice that these are
actually pretty heavy compared to the chains that
we would think of today and you have to keep in mind that most
of the chains that we have today are machine
made and these all would have been handmade. So a goldsmith would have to
sit down and make a little link and then connect it
to another link and then connect it to another link,
so they had to be big enough for a person to actually work with them,
so they're not nearly as delicate as a lot of the chains that we see today.
They're much heavier and bolder i mean they're still not like
you know these enormous things or anything like that but just keep in mind
the size that a human would need to make when you're thinking
about the chains that you're going to be wearing.
Here's two more styles and this one's done up sort of in the festoon style
with a beautiful little anchor charm and here we have another one who
just has a decorative clasp so it's a longer chain that she's worn
looped up both as a short version and a long
version here. Miniatures were another popular style of jewelry in the Georgian
period and a miniature is basically like a tiny little portrait.
So in the 18th century you typically would have seen
these portraits being worn on ribbon. You can see here that she has it on a long
ribbon and pinned to her bodice. This one is wearing a
miniature on a ribbon on her wrist as a bracelet,
and it's even possible that she has another miniature here um
on a narrow ribbon that's going down into her bust.
And that could be lots of other things as well, but sometimes you see
miniatures worn this way and as you get into the 19th century
typically you're seeing miniatures being worn on chains. I'm not
sure why this is the case - it may just be that
chains became more popular in general so they're a great thing to put a miniature
on, but typically as you get into the 1790s
you start to see chains being used for miniatures more
commonly than ribbon. And miniature can sometimes be a
misnomer. I mean Ii like to call this style like a "bigature" because she's
wearing like basically a regular-sized portrait on
her person! So sometimes you see these really big
miniatures that are worn as well. You see them in other styles of jewelry
as well: this is a miniature that's painted into sort of a festoon style
necklace. Here's a beautiful miniature that's
strung with pearls to be worn as a bracelet.
Yet another weird little fad from this period were lovers eyes.
So these were popular only from about the 1790s to the 1810s,
and they're these little tiny portraits of somebody's eye.
So this would have been the eye of your lover - these are typically
romantic and not, you know, you wouldn't have like your mom's eye
or something like that but, it would be somebody you were having some sort
of romantic relationship with. Some people find these incredibly creepy.
I personally think they're really cool and I love them they're just
very intimate and beautiful, but you see these sort of spring up for
just a little bit like in the regency period.
Now i'm not going to talk about many jewelry styles specifically for earrings,
but one style that I do want to point out
are hoop-and-pearl because they are so common that they do deserve a mention.
You see this style - I mean back in ancient portraits of
people carved into vases from the minoan era all the way up into
the georgian era and beyond! So the style doesn't really change that much.
It's a big pearl on a hoop-style finding. If you could only have one piece of
historical jewelry to use for every era possible it is the hoop and
the pearl! This is the one! They do start to get
rather large, um, especially as you get into the 1780s
because when hair starts to get really big you need
really big earrings to balance it out. So you start to see
lots and lots of these what i'd call "big-ass pearls"
as you get into the 1780s and 1790s. So don't be afraid of giant pearl earrings -
totally historically accurate! Still fabulous!
Just go for it and again these are almost certainly going to be fake pearls
on both of these girls. They also wore hoop earrings.
People see pictures like this and they're always like "these look so modern"
but they totally wore large hoop earrings. They were
commonly called "poissairde" earrings which basically means
"fish hook" because they sort of had the look of a fish hook.
But you see these as well. These are particularly common again in
the 1780s 1790s into the regency period. They just become really common styles.
Super cute! There's a fun little fad in the regency
period of "quizzing glasses" and that's these little
bitty things here that are basically a magnifying glass
in a decorative holder - usually on a chain or a ribbon or something like that.
And they were worn as basically kind of necklaces, although they're usually worn
really long so you can pick them up and look quizzically at people. They were
worn by both men - uh fashionable men - and women so they
sort of knew no gender and they're just this really
cool little wacky thing that happens. You can often
find these on places like ebay for not crazy
amounts of money. There's enough of them that have
survived, um, that they're not, they're not that hard to find. I have
several antique Georgian ones in my collection that i've just come across
that i just think they're super cool. All right so uh in the 18th century
especially you see lots of examples of ribbons and lace-style necklaces, so here's just
three examples of a really fluffy lace necklace sort of thing on
madame pompadour, here's a really cool example of pearls
being worn on top of a ribbon so you get the effect of both of them,
and sometimes you see these very simple narrow black silk ribbons just tied
around the neck. Just a simple elegant little accessory.
And so you can see these are three examples of people who are dressed very
finely, um so you don't necessarily have to wear
big sparkling crystals, like you can accessorize your outfits with these
really simple styles that look beautiful and are very easy and very cheap!
And let's talk a little bit about hair jewelry.
So in the 18th century they wore two styles of hair jewelry.
One of them is this aigrette which is an actual sort of
a plume of decoration and you often see these
looking like flowers feathers some sort of natural element to them.
These are often what's called "en tremblant" so
these little bits that stick up were on tiny little springs
so as you move they kind of shimmer and shake and they move with your movement,
so they catch light beautifully and they're really gorgeous.
And then you also have these more simple styles of hair decoration
which are basically jeweled like little buttons on
hairpins essentially, and you could just stick those into your hair.
These are uh popular up until about the late 1770s
because as you get into the 1780s, hair starts to get
bigger and softer and you don't quite have a base for these things,
so these hair jewelry styles really go out of fashion in
about the late 1770s and you don't really see them coming back
until you get more into the late regency/ Victorian period and they come back in a
slightly different way. But these are a very distinctive sort
of mid 18th century item of jewelry. Now tiaras are another
story! Tiaras and hair combs come into
fashion in the late 1790s and i don't really
know why. They're not a thing before then. They certainly had
crowns, like, that royalty would have worn. Those were a thing
way longer than this, but you start to see these little tiara styles come into
fashion in the late 1790s. And here's a quite elaborate one with
lots of halos around it really beautiful and it matches her necklace,
and then this is an awesome example of just like a
daywear tiara. I mean this is very simple. And of course it has these little
curls that already come pre-attached so you just plop it on and, like, your hair
is all done! This is not typical, I mean this is a
very unusual piece, but I always like including it because
it's just such a clever idea. So genius, super cute. A lot of times if
you're looking at hair combs from this period, you
may notice that the tines look like they're in the
wrong place. So instead of them coming back so
you could wear it as a crown, they almost sort of bow out this way and
that's because these are designed to be worn at the back
of the hair. So if you had a bun or some sort of chignon or something like that
you would put one of these combs in the back facing backwards,
so that way you're sparkly both coming and going.
These are typically seen in sets so you would have one
front facing tiara and one back facing comb and they would come
together. But the back combs have survived in
greater numbers because they're so weird that they weren't used
in a lot of other periods. So you could continue wearing a tiara,
I mean, forever, but you have to have certain styles of
hair for these back combs to work and they just kind of were not as functional.
So you see a lot of these come up as part of antique
sales and things like that, and you're like "how do you even wear this?" This is
why! They would have been stuck in the back
of the head so they are curving the right way if you think about them that
way. A really cool style of jewelry that I
want to talk about is harlequin and acrostic jewelry.
And these are jewelry styles where you have lots of different stones
all together in one piece. So harlequin is when you just have these
mixed colors of different gems or different paste stones.
They just kind of go together with whatever colors, and you see harlequin
necklaces, harlequin rings, harlequin bracelets -
that's what this is. So this is a pretty typical style of
jewelry. And another similar version of this is acrostic jewelry,
and these were used to spell out messages. So in this
ring we have got ruby an emerald a garnet
an amethyst another ruby and a diamond, so this spells out regard r-e-g-a-r-d.
So this was something that you could have given to a friend, a lover,
um, somebody you had a personal connection to, and it would sort of send
them a little message. So you see these little collections of
messages in jewelry sometimes, and they're they're just super cool and very
charming. Now parures, which is like a set of jewelry, is
something that's really associated with the Georgian era and it should be!
But there's two distinctive styles of parures.
In the first we have the 18th century parure and these are typically
very simple compared to what we're going to see in just a little bit.
And they almost always consist of just a necklace
and a pair of earrings, and yes this is in fact a necklace. I know it looks super
short but of course because we have those
loops on the end where they would tie with the ribbon
we can identify what that is. And here's another really similar style
of a necklace with the loops and a pair of earrings and one thing I do want to
point out here is if you notice the bottom of this necklace there's this
little loop that's here, and that's where a pendant
could hook on or come off. So this parure in particular
did have a matching pendant with it, which has been lost over the years,
but it would allow for a little bit of variation- you do see that.
And we'll have a better example right here! So this is an
excellent example of a 19th century parure.
As you get into the regency period, parures become much more elaborate
and incredible. So here we have a necklace, we have two matching bracelets,
you would have worn one on each wrist, and you have several pairs of earrings.
Now let's talk about these earrings a little bit, because you'll notice that
these just look like they're two little pendants.
That's because this is something called a day and night earring.
So the actual earring is only this top part with the little squares,
and these are detachable loops so they basically
come off of this thing, so you could either wear these individually with just
the single stone, you could clip on these so that you had
just three smaller stones, or you can wear the full shebang with this big
teardrop shape on it, so there's a lot of flexibility.
And these pendants show the same thing. Um so this one could be a brooch, it's
hard to tell from here, or it could be a pendant. This pendant
you can definitely see is on a chain, but you'll notice again on this necklace,
in the center stone, you have this loop that's here just like
in that necklace I showed you before and that's where one of these pendants
could clip on or off. So maybe you just want to wear the
simple earrings and one pendant and you're good to go, and maybe one day
you want to wear all of this all together and you just layer
everything on. There's so much flexibility with these.
It is it's genius the way that they thought about how they used their
jewelry and their materials. Here's another outstanding example of a
parure, and this one features micro mosaics. So
each one of these little medallions that you see here
features some style of ruin, something decorative,
and it has this beautiful grape leaf style motif as well.
This is so neoclassical and so beautiful! It's just
an exquisite set of jewelry, and again you could just wear the necklace one day
you could just wear the hair comb one day,
you know there's there's no rules about how much you want to wear at once.
And here's probably my favorite parure, if I had to pick one.
Um this is a beautiful example of peridot: again we have,
you know, the necklace with the detachable pendant, we have two bracelets
we have earrings here, and then you also have these little bits that are around
here these are rings, brooches, hair pins that can be
used for lots of things. And one thing i want to point out about
is look at the size of this parure! We sometimes have this idea that they
wore, like, really delicate jewelry, but hopefully the images that i've
showed you and this one shows that sometimes they wore
big honking really huge elaborate beautiful jewelry!
I mean look at the size of this thing! Like, that would turn heads the second
that you walked into any room. And sometimes you had parures
that are incredibly elaborate, like empress
Josephine here with her tiara and her crown and her earrings and
her big ole necklace and i'm sure she's
wearing matching bracelets, and here we have a really simple example of a parure
with just a simple day hair comb, a simple strand of beads, it's possible
she may have a pair of earrings, a little hard to see, but you know it's
just something that's really simple, so a parure was not necessarily this big
elaborate set. It could be just a small matching set. So
we've talked a lot about matching jewelry, but I don't want to
focus on that because matching was not really necessary in
jewelry from the Georgian era. They were more than happy to mix and
mismatch styles, colors, metals, you know they would
have worn gold and silver together, they would have
worn crystals and pearls, together they would have worn
different colors of crystals you know. Here we have a really nice example of a
simple pearl necklace and she's wearing it on top of
a pendant on a narrow black ribbon so she's got two things.
Here we have a really cool example of really elaborate jewelry. She's wearing
double collet necklaces here and she has earrings that do not match.
You know they match her dress but they don't match her necklace, and there's
even, like, a little tiny set of pins that are in her cap decorating that match
the earrings, but not the necklace, So she's
mixing and matching two sets of jewelry here
and that's perfectly fine! They just were not concerned with matching like we are
today, because jewelry was expensive! Even cheap
jewelry, even costume jewelry, even paste and fake
stuff, was still an expensive investment so
you're not gonna have jewelry to match every single outfit, like unless you're
empress Josephine. I mean that's pretty much the bar of people who could match
every outfit, so most people are going to wear what
they have what they have available. If it matches that's great, but they just
weren't so concerned with that, so feel free to mix up your jewelry that
you have. You don't have to always wear sets together.
Here are some great examples from the 19th century of people who are just throwing
everything on together. I mean this lady - she's got
multi-strand corals, she's got big long chains, she's got
some sort of a big elaborate gold earring, she's got a tortoiseshell hair
comb, so she's sort of throwing everything.
And here we have, I mean, one of the greatest jewelry heroes of all time! I
mean she's got a tiara and earrings and a necklace that
all match and maybe even this belt buckle looks
like it matches too, but then she's also throwing on
her shorter chain, and her longer chain, and her
miniature, and her watch, and some sort of fob.
I mean she's just got everything thrown on together! if it matches that's great,
if it doesn't she doesn't care. Put it on! Layer that stuff on!
Now as we move into pre-Victorian era, so the 1820s,
styles start to change really dramatically and that's where you start
to get sort of these heavier styles of jewelry. This is a
style called "cantille" [Can-Tee], which features lots of really
elaborate little bits of gold work wire, it's sort of a filigree
style, and often gems are set into that. This is
a very distinctive sort of Victorian style,
so this is where you can see that styling moving towards the future a
little bit. You can see this looks wildly different
from anything that we've seen prior to this, so this is an 1830s set of
jewelry. It's cast. They're starting to play more
with casting of metals at this point, so you can get
these really elaborate pieces that would have been
very challenging to do prior to this, because you would have been having to
hand carve or chase all these pieces, which is just really challenging.
So it starts to be more common as they're sort of changing the way that
they're making jewelry. And here's a great
example of a portrait of somebody from the late 1820s
and you can really see she's got sort of more of a
distinctive Victorian style to her, especially if you think about this super
heavy elaborate necklace. She is wearing mismatched jewelry, i'll
point out. She's got a gold and amethyst necklace and what
looks like either cut steel or crystal earrings with a
matching "ferroniere" - that's what this little
headband thing is called which had a brief little
resurgence in popularity in the 1830s - so she's wearing
mismatched stuff, even though she's clearly very wealthy
and has access to a lot of stuff. But you can see that we're talking
about really distinctive styles of jewelry as you get into the sort of
pre-Victorian 1820s/1830 era. All right thank you so much! I hope that
presentation was useful, I hope it inspired you, I hope it
empowered you to make some decisions about some of the jewelry that you have
and how you're going to style your historical costumes,
and I hope you enjoyed just looking at some really beautiful pictures!
If you have any questions about anything, please feel free to drop them down below
in the comments and I'll be more than happy to answer them. I'll be keeping an
eye on all my youtube comments over the weekend and make sure that I
get everything if I can. If you want to check out some of my reproduction
historical jewelry, including a lot of pieces that were
inspired by the images I just shared with you,
you can visit my website at www.damesalamode.com,
and of course i'll drop a link down in the video notes below.
I hope you've enjoyed this cocovid presentation
amd please consider subscribing to my channel where I talk a lot about
historical fashion and costuming, and I hope to see you again in the
future. Thanks so much have a great day!
