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Pearls as Fashion
Americans spend more each year on pearls than any other consumers in the world. Much of what they buy passes through New York.
The United States, fashion leaders, such as Harry Winston, Van Cleef and Arpel, Tiffany, Cartier, and Aspray have created the image for the pearl.
One of the best known pearl dealers is Salvador Assael, who specializes in South Sea pearls from Tahiti and Australia, that command dazzling prices in New York's auction rooms and jewelry salons.
Assael says after his family and office staff he loves pearls beyond anything. A pearl necklace can be worn by a woman for 20 years or 30 years, pass it off to her daughter. The daughter can wear it again for 20 or 30 or 40 years, and give it again. A strand of pearls, he says, can last hundreds of years.
Pearls as fashion in the 20th century is exemplified by the range of ages and the types of women who wore them, starting in the '20s with Josephine Baker, an erotic Parisian dancer.
Her flamboyant costumes included yards of the gem that had once been the trademark of nobility.
Later, suddenly the girl from the good family, the patrician upper-crust, represented in American film by Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, were were wearing gloves and hats and the perfect pearl choker.
In the 1950s mothers gave her daughter pearls on their graduation day, and these have been passed down. Pearls symbolized a wealth and a glamour important in America. Today there are several contemporary jewelry designers turning tradition upside down with pearls, such as the Biwa pearl.
Formed in fresh water mussels, the Biwa pearls are induced by inserting mantle tissue alone without a bead. As a result, it's the shape of the tissue that determines the shape of the pearl. But as environmental pollution contaminates the lake where they grow, these gems are now virtually unobtainable.
Currently, the black pearl has captured the attention of jewelry designers. Once considered an exotic oddity, rare and almost mythical, black pearls have become increasingly popular.
Assael is credited with helping introduce the black pearl to New York's fashion jewelers. Today, more islands in the South Pacific are producing the once-rare black pearl.
There are at least 40 different colors of black, ranging from peacock, the top color, down to the fine black, down to a gun metal gray, to almost very, very light gray.
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