The jewels in the gown

The line between clothing and jewellery has rarely been so blurred. A few pieces from the past six months come to mind — a dress, for example, by Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vaccarello, where the body is encased in a simple shift dress created not of fabric but a filigree net of crystal strass with dangling YSL logos. Then there are the clothes from Area designers Beckett Fogg and Piotrek Panszczyk that resemble bravado reclamations of Vegas showgirl costumes, with dripping Victor/Victoria wigs of crystal and cupped bras made of plated brass and glass crystal.

There are sensuous chainmail tops by the nascent designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin that cover about as much flesh as a necklace, and the intricate haute couture dresses of Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli, which may have a gleaming, entirely metal bodice, or eschew a top in favour of baroque swirls of gold over the breasts. The rapper Cardi B recently took up the trend at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala in a Versace dress strung with chain and medallions that seemed as if she’d rolled around in Donatella Versace’s jewellery box before she stepped out on the red carpet.

These clothes are striking, look-at-me creations that grab attention, newspaper headlines — and shoppers’ budgets: those Area bijou-brassieres are virtually sold out online, while Vaccarello’s minidress on ysl.com is out of stock.

They feel fresh — but they’re not entirely new. In the Renaissance, with fashionable costume the preserve of royalty, moneyed landowners and merchants, clothing and jewellery went hand-in-hand. We are familiar with images such as Nicholas Hilliard’s portraits of Elizabeth I, rendered icon-like and embroidered with hundreds of pearls (her gemstone of choice, for its implied chastity). She was the rule, rather than the exception, the clothes of her counterparts in courts across the world likewise smothered in jewels.

Garments in those days were often not sewn, but pinned together: the pins were brass, for ordinary folk, but for the wealthy they were gold, sometimes set with jewels, and needed in vast quantities as they would scatter as people moved around. Indeed, the seemingly ceaseless supply of pins required for everyday dress necessitated their own budget — hence the term “pin money”.

The gold-chased, intricately engraved suits of armour of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, too were more jewellery than fashion, designed to flummox his enemies with a visual representation of power. Ultimately, fashion and jewellery both serve the same intention: magnificence, an idea so powerful that Henry (and a bunch of other monarchs) tried in vain to control it using sumptuary laws about who could wear what, when, and in what colour. They rarely succeeded.

By the 19th century, however, the idea of jewellery and clothing had separated — as notions such as haute couture and the designer label began to emerge, jewel-embroidered clothes became the preserve of the demi-mondaine, the courtesans and mistresses of French high society. It wasn’t seen to be so flashy — as Edith Wharton recounted in The Age of Innocence, society women used to pack away fashionable gowns for a few seasons to not seem too “à la mode”.

Carolina Otero, known as “La Belle Otero” was a different figure altogether: a Spanish dancer, actress and purported mistress to crowned heads who caused a sensation in fin de siècle Paris with a bolero of jewels — “real diamonds, real emerald, rubies larger than marbles”, according to breathless press reports of 1902. It was kind of a trend: another courtesan, Émilienne d’Alençon, reportedly had a corset made of diamonds too.

John Galliano harked back to those foibles in some of his earliest work at Christian Dior: for his autumn/winter 1997 haute couture collection, inspired by Mata Hari, the French costume jewellery creator Goossens was employed to devise dresses that recalled La Belle Otero’s fusions of fashion and fine jewellery: it cut French guipure lace, dipped individual floral designs in metal to create plates, then intricately reassembled them with chain links, studded with rhinestones or topaz stones for mind-boggling good measure. One was suspended from an Edwardian-inspired choker necklace, also of metallised-lace. 

Magnificent. But unlike the Tudors, when designers fuse jewellery and fashion now the aim isn’t to gobsmack with displays of wealth. When they do do that, it’s kind of tacky — 20 or so years ago, the Welsh designer Julien MacDonald created a lace dress with a purported million pounds worth of diamonds in a glittering spray across one shoulder, a collaboration with De Beers. It should have seemed razzle dazzle, but wound up a bit gauche.

That’s not to say that these clothes don’t cost: Anthony Vaccarello’s standout Saint Laurent dress is £48,555. But that’s not the point. Rather, designers today are using jewellery methods to create clothes that amaze through technique and construction, at a time when sumptuary displays of wealth through fabric and embroidery are kind of commonplace, and you can buy diamonds at every high street H Samuel. Indeed, the late 20th century saw a resurgence in the fusion of fashion with jewels, paradoxically representing a swing towards both the past and the future.

The latter was present in the ’60s, naturally, with Paco Rabanne’s 1966 innovative use of metallics and plastics to create garments. He himself called the collection “Twelve Unwearable Dresses In Contemporary Materials”, with clothes created from plates and chains, adjusted with pliers and bolt-cutters rather than needle and thread. They are still influential today, not least for the designer who now helms Rabanne’s label, Julien Dossena, who offers ready-to-wear versions in slinky chainmail, and others in pliable plastics that move with the body. And although seemingly hyper-modern, they reflect a long history, all the way back to chainmail.

Armour was also one of Lee Alexander McQueen’s longest-lasting obsessions, and he worked with the jeweller Shaun Leane to create pieces that tested the limits of jewellery and fashion. Those included a brief hooded bodysuit of bejewelled armour plates for his spring/summer 2000 collection, and a number of cast-metal corsets shaped like the distinctive concentric ringed necklaces worn by the Kayan Lahwi women of Myanmar.

Jewellery techniques can yield clothes that look otherworldly and extraordinary, rather than glittery and showgirly. Kei Ninomiya, who designs the label Noir and is supported by Comme des Garçons, uses chain-links as one method to hold the pieces of his extraordinary clothing together. The results often look like cacti, or even viral structures, vast honeycombs of fabric tessellated and interlinked without sewing, their pinched and folded organic forms an obvious link to origami and kirigami. “The only stitching is on the label,” Ninomiya once told me, with a smile. For him, these techniques more usually applied to jewellery are a way to assemble clothes in an entirely new fashion. “I think I should change the way to make clothes,” he states.

As the name suggests, Noir clothes are often black — a perverse nose-thumbing at all that glorious, intricate technique. But he’s the exception to the rule. If the technique of these bijou-couture pieces impress fashion insiders — those who can appreciate the ferocious technical complexity of fashioning a dress from chain, or the challenges of fitting a cast-metal corset or steel-plate dress — generally speaking, the connection between jewellery and fashion links with a certain egomaniacal streak characteristic of today.

That means sparkle — lots of sparkle, and that’s why these pieces are resonating so loudly right now — outfits perfectly engineered to glitter in a brief, TikTok-able passage from a car to an event, making the wearer shine bright. Maybe that makes some people sneer — but there’s another reason they feel so right in 2022. After a dour period of dressing down in sweatpants and pyjamas, postmodern showgirl costumes are the logical antidote, a feel-good hit of glitter. Magnificence isn’t just about beating down your enemies — it’s about building yourself up, too. 

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