Remember rummaging through your mother's jewelry box and playing dress-up with her rhinestones, her old Mexican silver and the delicate Edwardian filigree necklace passed down from your grandmother?
Remember how you thought the jewelry was passe? Not at all. Mother was hipper than you thought.
Vintage jewelry like Mama wore is becoming hot, hot, hot, and its new-found cachet has transformed it into a fashion-world collectible.
"There is no question there's more and more of it at antiques shows than ever before," says Frank Farenbloom, the Rockville-based promoter of Shador Inc., which produces antiques shows nationwide, including the popular Baltimore Summer Antiques Fair over the Labor Day weekend.
"People like the individuality of vintage jewelry," Farenbloom says. "The beauty of it is that it's jewelry that has withstood the test of time, held its value and come back round as a collectible. Besides that, it's fun to wear."
"These are miniature works of art, one-of-a-kind pieces that make a beautiful fashion statement," says Nel Umbaugh, a vintage-jewelry dealer at antiques markets in the Baltimore-Washington region for the past eight years. "And people are wearing it everywhere. A nice, tasteful piece of vintage jewelry goes with anything, from bluejeans to ball gowns."
Basically, the term vintage jewelry refers to items dating from the early 1900s, starting with the Edwardian period. Unfamiliar with that epoch? You only think you are. The hugely popular minimal, or Y, necklaces that are showing up on every other young girl's neck are a knockoff of the classic Edwardian filigree pieces.
Original Edwardian jewelry and early art deco pieces tend to be especially sought after, although Victorian pieces, Mexican silver and some of the finer costume jewelry from the 1930s and 1940s have their own fervent fans. Probably the most popular pieces at the moment: platinum filigree diamond engagement rings from the first decade of this century.
"I don't buy anything new anymore, and I think there are a lot of people like me out there," says Carole A. Berk, a Bethesda gallery owner, a Mexican-silver specialist and co-author of "Mexican Silver" (Schiffer, 1994). The book is an antiques-industry bible on the pre-Columbian-style silver produced in Taxco, Mexico, in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s by such American expatriates as Frederick Davis and William Spratling and their followers.
