History in the making

By Isabel Lloyd

In many ways, jewellery is the most limited of arts. Precious stones and metals are unreliable, recalcitrant base materials with only a few, often nannyish ways of getting them to do the thing you want. The objects you make mustn't be too heavy, unwieldy or scratchy, but they have to be sturdy: as in engineering, all the bits have to stick together. So when the engineers, as they occasionally do, come up with a new way of building, cue much excitement. Designs change, fashions change, even entire markets change.

Take the cultured pearl. In 1905, after decades of experiment and a couple of fairly major setbacks—killer algae, the death of his wife—a Japanese noodle-salesman called Kokichi Mikimoto finally worked out how to prod oysters into making properly round pearls on demand. An industry that had been virtually fished-out leapt back into life, throwing out little balls of nacre like popcorn; the classic string of pearls moved from the preserve of grande dames of the Belle Epoque (when, weight for weight, they cost more than diamonds) to the neck of your average aspirational housewife. Pearl glut duly led to pearl boredom, which jewellers tried to counter by promoting some often only dubiously attractive colours. But it also gave them more raw material to play with: if you want Big Pearls, you can have them.