The Jewelry Vibe Is Decidedly Victorian

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The Jewelry Vibe Is Decidedly Victorian

Cece Fein-Hughes, a jewelry designer in London, has planned to introduce on Wednesday a collection of enameled engagement rings and matching lockets called Extraordinary Lovers. That the customizable 18-karat gold pieces owe their inspiration to a family heirloom is no surprise — the history of jewelry has been one revival after another.

More intriguing is the heirloom’s back story: The gold locket was a mourning jewel from the Victorian era that belonged to Ms. Fein-Hughes’s maternal great-grandmother, who wore it as a memorial piece for her son (Ms. Fein-Hughes’s great-uncle). It still contained a picture of the young man, along with a lock of his brown hair, beneath its pearl and ****** enamel cover.

“It’s super spooky,” Ms. Fein-Hughes, whose brand is called Cece Jewellery, said on a video call last month from her studio in West London. “But it’s inspired me to create lockets that carry that same core message, which is like a secret message for a loved one. Though it is freaky that there’s a bit of hair in there.”

After decades of Deco dominance, the vibe among contemporary jewelers has turned decidedly Victorian. From the insect jewels swarming retail showcases to the popularity of jewelry featuring hidden messages, the trends dominating the jewelry marketplace have their roots in the 1800s: the ******* that coincides with Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901, as well as the stylistically similar Georgian era that preceded it.

“Victorian jewelry had so much meaning,” Beth Bernstein, a vintage jewelry specialist in Florida, said in an interview. “When Queen Victoria first got married to Prince Albert, her engagement ring was a snake. It became a symbol of enduring love because of their love story.”

In July, ACC Art Books published Ms. Bernstein’s volume, “Jewelry’s Shining Stars: The Next Generation: 45 Visionary Women Designers,” which included a chapter titled “The Revivalists,” dedicated to jewelers such as Jenna Grosfeld of Los Angeles, who has mined the past for ideas for her Jenna Blake brand.

Ms. Bernstein said the Victorians’ penchant for festooning their jewels with flowers, insects, swallows, serpents, crescent moons and other symbols rich with meaning first struck a chord with contemporary designers about 20 years ago when more women began buying jewelry for themselves and embraced designs that reflected their beliefs and dreams.

That tendency “got stronger during the pandemic as people looked to jewelry for meaning, protection and love,” Ms. Bernstein said.

She cited the Lebanese jeweler Selim Mouzannar, whose 25-year-old brand draws on memories of the Ottoman-style jewels that he encountered as a boy in the Beirut souk, where his father maintained a jewelry workshop.

“The Ottoman emperors ruled the area for more than 400 years and they were connected directly to the Victorians — Ottoman and Victorian style are cousins,” Mr. Mouzannar said on a video call from his workshop in the Achrafieh district of Beirut.

“When I began my first collection, what annoyed me in these jewels was their sadness,” he said. “I wanted to make my jewelry with humor and happiness. I wanted to put some ****** in it.”

In addition to adding rose-cut sapphires, rubies and other ******** stones to his designs, Mr. Mouzannar has made ample use of celestial motifs, first popularized during the Victorian era.

Jessie Evans, the British designer behind the fine jewelry line Jessie V E, turned to the ******* in 2015 when she designed her Lucky Numbers collection, a series of darkened platinum numerals set with ****** diamonds that she created after studying Victorian-style lettering.

“I always say the Victorians are my favorite weirdos,” Ms. Evans said last month from her home in Kent, a county southeast of London, where she has continued to design jewels that feature both literal and symbolic references to the era. “There’s just something about the ******* that fascinates me.”

The London jeweler Lucy Delius can relate. She founded her own brand two years ago after she was unable to find a Victorian pocket watch chain with trombone links — called that because they are long and narrow, like a trombone slide — and decided to make it herself. “I actually started in nine-karat gold because all lovely Victorian jewelry is in nine-karat,” she said at the Couture jewelry show in Las Vegas this spring, where she showed her collection.

Ms. Delius said she was working on a mourning locket for a client whose son ***** in his 20s. “She wants to put his ashes in it,” she said. “At first, I thought it was quite a creepy thing. And then I realized it was so beautiful and Victorian.

“It’s just such an amazing romantic *******. And to think that everything was made by hand in those days. Modern designers, they kind of act like, ‘Oh, I’ve invented this chain.’ But these silhouettes have been around for such a long time.”

The techniques perfected by the Victorians are as inspiring to modern designers as their aesthetics. Just ask Sylva Yepremian, the founder of Sylva & Cie., a fine jewelry brand in Los Angeles.

“The Victorians were not just artisans, they were artists,” Ms. Yepremian said last month on a video call from her home in Glendale, Calif. “Unlike the Deco era, when there were better tools and the industrialization of jewelry making was a little farther along, they had to make designs based on unexacting proportions. When you see a beautiful Victorian piece ********* to perfection with lumpy, bumpy stones, but a perfect harmonious layout — for me, it’s like the birds start singing.”

One of her brand’s signature styles, the Ten Table Ring — a rectangular ring that the website said was designed to be seen “from 10 tables away” — was based on a Georgian mourning pin that Ms. Yepremian bought in the early 2000s.

In creating her own design, she said, “the base of the ring is in yellow gold, and I put a very thin one-millimeter hand-forged sheet of silver on top of the ring, which formed the Ten Table.”

“And then the stones are set in silver,” she continued. “The silver is then oxidized because that’s how Victorian jewelry looks now. It has oxidized over the last couple of centuries, and it has this really beautiful worn-in patina that I give to most of my pieces today.”

Borrowing Victorian styles and recreating them in more wearable pieces doesn’t just appeal to jewelry designers nostalgic for an earlier era — clients are snapping up the jewels, too.

Jillian Sassone, the founder and creative director of Marrow Fine, a jewelry retailer and manufacturer in San Diego, learned that in 2022, when she introduced a 14-karat gold and ****** enamel band with the words “til ******” in Gothic-style lettering.

“I was inspired by the remembrance rings from the Victorian era. I liked that idea, but I wanted to make it a little bit more contemporary,” Ms. Sassone said on a recent video call from her office in Del Mar, Calif. “It’s our most popular ring by 10,000 percent. We’ve sold thousands of them.”

Guy Burton, the managing director of Hancocks London — a 175-year-old vintage jewelry and antiques dealer that recently opened a new showroom on St. James’s Street, near Buckingham Palace — said “the pendulum swing of fashion” and the current vogue for “being individual and unique” were factors contributing to a revival in Victorian style, which reflected a hodgepodge of influences.

“It was a golden age of exploration, of manufacturing techniques, different social interests integrating more into jewelry,” Mr. Burton said. “It might be the discovery of an Egyptian sarcophagus or Italian villas and micromosaics, or Darwinism and their fascination with plants.

“It’s ******* to stereotype the Victorians. They expressed themselves in their jewels. I think it’s a really fantastic era.”

Bill Rau, the third-generation owner of M.S. Rau, an antiques dealership founded in 1912 in New Orleans, echoed that sentiment. “Victorian jewelry is the very first ******* of great jewelry,” he said.

“It was the first ******* that put the gems, the workmanship and the Industrial Revolution together,” he continued. “For the first time there was a substantial middle class that could afford a wonderful piece of jewelry. And because of that, it required the Victorians to be more innovative.”

Mr. Rau said there were many distinguishing elements of Victorian jewelry, chief among them delicate gold work such as filigree and repoussé and the use of seed pearls, enamel and a wide variety of ******** stones.

Of all their contributions to the jewelry canon, however, the Victorians’ most lasting legacy may be the way they used jewelry as a vehicle for storytelling.

Anna Pierce, a jeweler in New York who makes custom lover’s eye rings — a nod to the Georgian and Victorian tradition of painting a miniature of the giver’s eye and then presenting it to a loved one — singled out that dimension of Victorian jewelry as especially appealing.

“I fell in love with things that have a story,” Ms. Pierce said.

A kindred spirit lurks in Ashley Zhang, a designer in New York who sells both vintage jewels and contemporary designs inspired by them.

“I’ve seen a lot of people come into the antique jewelry world as collectors or sellers,” Ms. Zhang said. “At first, a lot get into the Deco era because it’s so glitzy and so cool and fun. But the more you collect jewelry the more you appreciate the Victorian era for its symbolism, because there’s so much thought put into each piece.

“I started as a Deco lover but I love Victorian more now — those pieces feel like they’re saying something.”

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