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Circa: 2006
Manufacturer: Vendome
Collector Bookstore is a retailer of new books located in Leavenworth, Kansas. We specialize in price guides and reference books for the antiques and collectibles industry. FROM COCO CHANEL IN THE 1920s TO YVES SAINT LAURENT IN THE 1970s to Lanvin today, haute couture costume jewelry has been an eye-catching accessory to enhance a designer's vision. The dazzling, one-of-a-kind jewelry was designed by skilled artisans to complement and adorn individual couture pieces for fashion shows and photo shoots. This sumptuous book surveys the exquisite range of costume jewelry produced by legendary European fashion houses over the past seventy-five years. The craze for costume jewelry began during the Jazz Age with Chanel when she took costume jewelry, previously only meant to be imitations of actual jewels, and turned the designs inside out, overstating and exaggerating these objects so they would.
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| never be mistaken for the real thing. In Allure Chanel she scoffed, "Nothing looks more like a fake jewel than a beautiful stone. Why get mesmerized by a beautiful stone? One might as well wear a check around one's neck." By the late 1920s the jewelry boxes of fashionable ladies held both traditional fine jewelry and Chanel "imitations" that were anything but copies and could be worn in outrageous ways as when flappers looped long strands of oversized pearls around their waif-like bodies. From this audacious start haute couture costume jewelry became increasingly extroverted and playful in the witty hands of Balenciaga, Dior, and Schiaparelli. The richness of color and the size of these faux-creations intended to be seen in the pages of Vogue and Elle grew into exaggerated sculptural forms of astonishing beauty. Costume jewelry became a hothouse for design ideas that look as fresh today as when they first appeared. The book includes a brilliant necklace of oversized coral branches and bronze leaves made for Yves Saint Laurent as well as Ungaro's series of fanciful pop art polished metal breastplates. The dynamic talents of the 1980s and 1990s, Christian Lacroix and Thierry Mugler, responded to costume jewelry's humble materials - brass, glass, crystal, Bakelite, and plastic by creating unusually beautiful examples that are authentic works of art in their own right. With hundreds of specially photographed, unique pieces, Costume Jewelry for Haute Couture will appeal to the social historian, collector, and fashionista alike. |
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