Fashion Jewelry: An Evolution

Today's fashion jewelry is able to draw on the past, both to choose antique pieces for use with current styles and to design totally new concepts with one foot in the past. Fashionable rings, pins, necklaces and other decorative pieces are available in boutiques, department stores and outlets for designers. They are also found in consignment shops, second-hand stores and flea markets.

Hand-crafted Georgian jewelry is a great example of historical pieces that can still be found occasionally in estate sales today. This era of jewelry featured garnets, emeralds, diamonds and sapphires as gemstones. Settings of silver holding faceted stones became a popular design. Georgian jewelry was worn both men and women. The Georgians wore an astonishing amount of jewelry at the same time. It was bold and heavy.

Victorian jewelry is an example of fashionable pieces from a bygone era. When thinking of this type of jewelry, women visualize cameos, chokers and hair ornaments that have great attention to detail. Victorian engagement rings are still popular today. They tend to be more ornate than some of the more modern designs and yet never look heavy or clumsy. Victorian lace is well translated into jewelry pieces from the period.

Chronologically, the Art Nouveau period was the next popular jewelry era. You can still obtain period pieces for jewelry from this school. Gemstones are often less costly than from early periods. Moonstones, opals and other colored gemstones often are used to enhance and draw focus to the design, rather than being the center. Some popular motifs are sunbursts, botanical items and languid female figures or faces.

The arts and crafts movement in jewelry and art was occurring at the same time as Art Nouveau. Instead of the machine made pieces of the industrial age, artisans in small factories or establishments produced beautiful and intricate handmade pieces. The volume of such pieces was limited, since they were one at a time creations and the time period in which they were produced was short, only about three to four decades.

Edwardian jewelry is heavily into the use of diamonds and platinum. The style tends to be lavish, ornate and even ostentatious by today's standards. The development of thin settings made the gemstones almost appear to be unsupported.

Art Deco jewelry designs used alternatives to traditional materials and designs. There was strong influence from the Caribbean, Africa and the Far East. Bakelite was a popular construction materials and angles were more popular than fluid curves.

The United States is the source of the jewelry fashion known as retro. It was highly popular by the Hollywood set. The look is bold and large. The pieces were best described as flamboyant. The materials used moved away from platinum, gold and silver to base metals. Charm bracelets were increasingly popular.

Today's fashion jewelry is a mix of many past generations, styles and looks. It is also skilled at pulling unique aspects of previous generations and recombining them for new and beautiful looks. Choose your own look by mixing and matching pieces.