Deploying paste, base metals, and imitation stones in the place of costly gems and other precious materials, costume jewelry has more to recommend it than just its price point. One of the most discerning collectors of the style is fashion designer Norma Kamali, who has been snapping up lux and creative examples from around the world since the 1960s.
Videochatting with me from her New York headquarters, Norma Kamali, seventy-nine, exudes magnetic chic. I have her undivided attention as we dive into her storied past. Sporting her signature blunt-cut bangs, oversized sunglasses, and motorcycle jacket, all in black, she easily recalls the decades when she embraced excess. “I had so much jewelry, I created a grid on the walls in my loft and put the jewelry on the grid grouped by type: all the brass, all the sapphire, etcetera,” she says. “I had a little grocery reacher tool and I would pull down whatever I needed. It looked beautiful, and it made it so much easier than having it in a jewelry box.”
Kamali remembers instinctively wearing her jewelry in layers. A photo from the early ’80s shows her casually clad in a denim jacket and jeans, oversized fish earrings above layers of gold-toned chain necklaces suspending various balls and baubles with an ethnic feel. Pictures from the ceremony where Kamali was honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America with the board of directors’ Special Tribute Award in 2005 show her wearing a black peasant-style blouse over a red ruffled skirt. Her jewelry is stacked, with multiple oversized earrings and a necklace with copper-colored rooster plaques. One arm sports tubogas-style bracelets wrapped multiple times, with the other wrist covered in at least seven bangles. The effect is joyful and maximalist and all about movement; even in the photos it is easy to imagine the bracelets clanging and sliding over each other, and the gentle sway of the oversized pendants and earrings complete with articulated fringe.
Kamali is recognized for her incredible style sense and ability to continually stay at the forefront of changes in fashion and the technology of running a business. She is best known for creating form-fitting bodycon dresses and athleisure wear worn by celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rihanna and Beyoncé. Her pieces have graced magazine covers and editorials since the 1970s, when she designed the sleeping bag coat after a rough night of camping with a boyfriend, and the red bathing suit from the famous Farrah Fawcett poster (a version of the coat resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the bathing suit is in the Smithsonian). Kamali’s perennial American style bridges the gap between affordable wearable pieces and a special piece of history that appeals to the fashionista collector. The Diana dress, one of her most popular, is nearly unchanged since Kamali designed it in the
1970s, retails for $250 and is an Instagram favorite, appearing in countless videos. Kamali’s minimalist designs can be dressed up or dressed down and make a perfect canvas for costume jewelry, as can be seen on her website—but more on that later.
As a force in the fashion industry for decades, Kamali has had ample opportunity to travel and collect. She searched for jewelry wherever she happened to be, from Portobello and King’s Roads in London to northern Brazil. She bought from dealers who had trays of jewelry they knew nothing about and from specialty vendors who knew exactly what they were offering, and what it was worth. When she wasn’t traveling herself, she made others her agents. “I wanted dance-related jewelry, so I asked people going to Africa regularly to look for that.”
While affordable jewelry made with inexpensive materials and imitation stones linked to changing clothing trends is recent to the last century, for as long as there has been jewelry, makers have looked for ways to imitate rare stones or materials. Ancient Egyptian faience, a blue-green ceramic often found in beads, is thought to mimic turquoise. The ancient Romans imitated other precious stones in glass. By the eighteenth century, faceted glass, called paste, was popular and even sought after by the nobility, but these early examples were always imitating fine jewelry materials and design. True costume jewelry took off in the early twentieth century, when industrialization allowed for the mass creation of less expensive materials and reduced the cost of producing more of a particular finished jewelry item.
In addition, social changes meant women worked outside the home and needed clothes and accessories for their new roles. The term “costume jewelry,” first appearing in the early 1900s, refers to costume in the sense of a complete outfit of clothing, one that would often be changed multiple times a day for specific purposes, and included housedresses to workwear to eveningwear and athleisure. In Paris in 1924 Coco Chanel wore costume jewelry and began manufacturing it for her clients. She said she felt the jewelry “was refreshingly free of arrogance, in a period that tended towards ostentatious displays of luxury.”
A century later, Kamali mirrors the designer’s sentiment: “I don’t have even a wedding ring,” she says. “Diamonds and that kind of thing are not as interesting to me, even though I appreciate extraordinary jewelry. I don’t feel comfortable with dollar signs on my body. I don’t want to think about having to worry about it. If something is beautiful and it looks like a work of art, I don’t care how much it is. I don’t care if it is made in the Amazon or Africa or a studio in Hollywood for a film. I think more about the character of a piece of art and that is always appealing.”
Hollywood films and costume jewelry hugely affected each other, sharing the same golden age in the 1930s and 1940s. The companies that had begun creating costume jewelry in America in the previous decades, including Miriam Haskell, Joseff of Hollywood, and Eisenberg, supplied creative and fashionable costume jewelry to stars and movie sets, while also offering comparable pieces to the American middle class. “As people left the monotony of everyday life to enter the cinema, they would get inspiration from the jewelry,” says Emily Stoehrer, jewelry curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “They would be able to go to their local shops and find similar things at an affordable or aspirational price that they could wear.” While the materials would often be inexpensive, many of the pieces were one-of-a-kind, handmade or hand-finished. “This is not cheap jewelry; this jewelry is creatively designed and innovative,” Stoehrer continues. “Designers were patenting and copywriting left and right. Many came from the fine jewelry world and costume jewelry gave then the freedom to explore. There is incredible variation in design and craftsmanship.”
Kamali spent decades assembling her jewelry collection, as well as other decorative objects, until 1996. She says, “I had turned fifty and I wanted a minimal environment and existence. These incredibly beautiful possessions that I had gathered and collected were no longer going to be a part of my life and I felt I needed to free myself of the responsibility of having them.” She called Christie’s and asked them to take many of her treasures to auction and put the jewelry in storage. “I never thought I would want to part with it because I had so much passion and love for each piece, and I still remember when I bought and wore each piece, what it meant to me, and what it felt like.”
I never thought I would want to part with [my jewelry collection] because I had so much passion and love for each piece, and I still remember when I bought and wore each piece, what it meant to me, and what it felt like.”
Norma kamali
The only jewelry Kamali wears today is a ring to track sleep and “a necklace full of engraved dogs’ tags from a vending machine at Walmart in Park City, Utah.” Every year since they met, Kamali and her husband, Marty, purchase two $6 tags engraved with “Normarty” and the date. “This is more than jewelry because, obviously, $6 dog tags, but it has more value because it is marking our history together. It is not expensive, but it is powerfully valuable to us. He has a key ring with all of them and I have this necklace.”
Kamali has decided now is the time to pass her jewelry to the next steward. Over the next year, several hundred examples from her personal collection will be released on her website in thematic groupings including pearls, rhinestones, copper, and more, styled over black Kamali bodysuits, giving the pieces immediate cool. The collection includes both signed and unsigned pieces from Miriam Haskell, Eisenberg, and others. With a little digging, you can find pieces she was photographed wearing to events, such as the CFDA rooster set and tubogas bracelets. Kamali says the jewelry “has a whole new life every time it goes from one person to the next. When I got the jewelry, it had already been in multiple hands and so it continues, this connection to people who have had it before and people who will have it after you. That is the beauty of vintage jewelry, it keeps giving joy and living another life with someone else.”
