Jewellery Fashions: Stones, Looks and the Current Fashion Trends

Jewellery design is like anything. It has a partial foot in the past and a little eye on the future. Modern designs rub shoulders with classics. Trends come and go.
One thing that never gets old is the stones that jewellers use, or rather the stones that jewellery wearers and buyers select to mark special occasions. Take the diamond, for example. A diamond is traditionally used to signify eternal love.

This is because of the almost indestructible nature of the stone, which contains one of thehighest mineral hardnesses of all – and which can barely be nicked, cut or scratched by any other substance known to humans. As a result, it was named for the Greek word “adamas”, which as literal meanings including unbreakable and constant – the qualities that we wish for true love.

The diamond is not the only stone to have great significance in the jeweller’s world. Birth stones, which may differ in Western and Eastern cultures, have specific significance for people who were born under them – and so some jewellery brands may make use of these characteristics to create personalised gifts for individual recipients.

The fashions that jewellers adhere to are clearly dictated by current tastes. Some current tastes, though – and this is specifically true at the moment – are in turn dictated by more classical allusions. Jewellery of a certain type, often referred to as vintage jewellery, is very popular at the moment, and has a strong relationship with the whole idea of retro imagery and retro clothing.

The retro ideal is essentially defined as any fashion or trend that makes specific references to the decorative styles of a time other than the one in which we now live. Clearly, there is some overlap here – because at some point, the popularity of  a retro trend becomes so prevalent that the look of the now is actually, really, the look of a completely different era.

This is illustrated ideally by some of the most famous fashion decades in history. The 1960s, for example, took their fashion cues originally from the 1950s – and then from a much more ornate period, with pseudo-Victorian and Edwardian ruffles and long coats replacing the original jeans, t shirts and leather jackets sported by teens in the know. The Beatles, in fact, started life as “greasers” – slick hair wearing, blue jean and dockhand t shirt sporting rockers. When they changed style to adopt the fashion trends taken up by the hippies – which were all velvet smoking jackets and suits that looked as though they had come from an Edward Gorey cartoon – the youth followed.

The 80s, similarly, robbed its style – from jewellery to shoes – from the 70s. Modern style has taken huge impetus from the 1980s, in its turn: to the point where the style of the second decade of the 21st century may now be called a style of its own, but where the look of that style is quite clearly a reimagining of the clothes and obsessions of the 80s. This is true in the dangling jewellery popular amongst younger jewellery wearers; in the Where’s Wally glasses we all where; and in the iconography of our t shirts, which explicitly celebrates 80s bands and TV shows – many of which the modern wearer will never even have seen or heard.
Such is the power of fashion. It reinvents, and makes the past its own.