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Yesterday the
snow drifted down and braceleted the bare branches outside our
windows in pearls and diamonds and crystals. The winter
white Olympics on television every night. It's fashion week
in New York, and we decided to turn instead to style, to the
timelessness of pearls (faux, cultured, or natural) with all their
connotations.... Shakespeare, in a time when pearls were in
vogue, even adorning the neck of Queen Elizabeth in both portrait
and real life, spoke of them only in metaphorical terms; pearls
were either tears, or a symbol for things priceless. Always
oriental.
The liquid
drops of tears that you have shed
Shall come
again, transform'd to orient pearl (Richard III)
What guests
were in her eyes, which parted thence
As pearls
from diamonds dropp'd.
(King Lear)
Shakespeare
associated pearls with India, his use of 'orient pearl' occurs
more than once in his writings. 'Her bed is India; there
she lies, a pearl' (Troilus and Cressida) to the famous line
from Othello: "...the base Indian [who] threw a pearl away /
Richer than all his tribe' (much scholarly discussion about
whether Shakespeare meant Indian or Judean, but there are
his other associations of pearls with India and the Orient;
nevertheless Desdemona is here the pearl!
Pearls as
symbols of luxury; Caesar limited their use (along with purple
robes and the use of litters for traveling) in his sumptuary laws.
Cleopatra dissolving one of her large pearl earrings in vinegar as
a symbol of extravagance...and so much more! Biblical
references to pearls abound: gates like pearls, casting pearls
before swine, a pearl of great price. In the Baroque era we
have Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665): here a
large luminous tear-like pearl earring, thought to be a symbol of
chastity and of the orient (the exotic also emphasized by the
turban); Vermeer has many of the women in his paintings wearing
pearls, even weighing pearls.... Indian maharajahs disported
themselves with extravagant strands—there are the famous
Baroda Pearls,
auctioned by Christie's in 2007, that date back to the 19th
Century.
The allure of
the pearl as fashionable accessory grew at the turn of the 20th
century. Tiffany & Co. commissioned extravagant pearl
necklaces from famed sculptor and designer Paulding Farnham.
In 1917, Pierre Cartier bought the Beaux Arts Plant Mansion on
Fifth Avenue for a hundred dollars and a pearl necklace valued at
one million dollars. Coco Chanel took pearls to new lengths,
piling strand upon strand, taking her cue perhaps from those peacocky Indian Maharajas—she was after all famous for
transforming menswear influences into feminine fashion! By
mid-century, pearls were synonymous with a certain sense of
glamour—think of Jackie O’s famous strands or perhaps the most
iconic image of chic in cinematic history—Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, faux pearls now worn with such elegant
insouciance.
Natural
pearls are thought to form when a grain of sand or parasite enters
a shell—the oyster secretes chemicals as a defense mechanism
against the intruder until a nacreous pearl is formed—how
brilliant that nature should choose to repel unwanted advances by
creating something so perfectly beautiful . . . .
Shop:
Pearls @Tiffany
& Co.
Shop:
Pearls @ J.Crew
Shop:
Pearls @
Net-a-porter
Tags:
jewelry
fashion
chanel
shakespeare
cleopatra
india
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Detail
from Tiepolo's The Banquet of Cleopatra, 1743-44
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria
Pearls
festoon the Maharajah of Mysore, 1906
The famous
Baroda Pearls |
