Key Events and Influences
In the companion chapter on The Shaping of Style: Makers, Patrons and Time, we explore the main agents behind style in jewellery, such as patrons, makers, materials and time. Now we ask a different question: not who shapes style, but what happens in the world that changes what jewellers make and what wearers come to desire.
This chapter follows a series of turning points. Each one opens a door to a rediscovered ancient world, a distant empire, new sources of wealth, new forms of media exposure, or changing ideas about life and death. None of these events are a style in themselves, yet together they form an engine behind many of the styles and influences that collectors and historians recognise today. Sometimes their influence is hidden, sometimes not so hidden, sometimes quiet, sometimes not so quiet.
1. Digging up the past
Archaeology and the rediscovery of ancient worlds
From the eighteenth century onwards, European courts and scholars began, quite literally, to dig up history. What they uncovered did not remain behind museum glass. It entered drawing rooms, fashion, and jewel cases.
Pompeii and Herculaneum
The excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii revealed entire streets, wall paintings and domestic objects preserved by volcanic ash. For jewellers, these sites became a pattern book of classical motifs and forms. Cameos and intaglios, laurel wreaths, Greek key borders and classical urns moved from buried Roman houses into neoclassical jewellery, worn as a sign of education and taste.
Napoleon in Italy and Egypt
Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy and Egypt were military ventures, but they also became cultural expeditions. Artists, architects and scholars travelled with the army, recording classical ruins and Egyptian monuments. The grand illustrated publications that followed, filled with engravings of temples, sphinxes and obelisks, ignited taste for both Greek and Roman classicism and Egyptian motifs. Napoleon’s empire jewellery, with its eagles, laurel crowns and stylised lotuses, is best understood against this political and archaeological background.
The nineteenth century archaeological revival
Later in the nineteenth century, spectacular discoveries in the Mediterranean and Near East deepened that fascination. In the Black Sea region, excavations of Scythian kurgans also drew public attention to ancient goldwork. Excavations in Assyrian sites, Etruscan tombs and Mycenaean graves inspired jewellers to imitate ancient techniques and forms as faithfully as possible. Gold granulation, filigree and bead borders were revived by houses such as Castellani, who presented their work as a learned reconstruction of the antique. These jewels were modern in date, but they were made to look ancient.
Tutankhamun and a new Egyptian fever
When the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, photographs and news reports spread with a speed unknown in earlier centuries. For a public already in love with modern luxury, the combination of gold, deep blue, turquoise and stylised forms was irresistible. Art Deco jewellers borrowed scarab forms, winged sun discs and geometric lotus flowers, creating a modern Egyptian flavour that still feels fresh today.
2. Empires, exhibitions and encounters
How global contacts entered the jewel box
Jewellery has always travelled with people, commerce and power. From the nineteenth century onwards, large international exhibitions and imperial events compressed the world into a single fairground, becoming powerful engines of inspiration.
World exhibitions in London, Paris and other capitals displayed machines, architecture, decorative arts and colonial goods side by side. Visitors could wander from medieval revival chalices to Indian court ornaments, from Japanese metalwork to newly patented alloys. For jewellers, these fairs were a laboratory and a shop window at once. Many revival styles, from Neo Gothic to Neo Egyptian, drew credibility and detail from objects first shown at such exhibitions.
India and the British Raj
India, with its courts, gemstones and long traditions of jewellery, played a special role. After the uprising of 1857, governance shifted to direct British Crown rule from 1858. Victoria’s adoption of the title Empress of India in 1876, and the great Delhi Durbars (grand imperial assemblies held in Delhi to proclaim and ceremonially mark the British monarch’s status as Emperor or Empress of India) that proclaimed and celebrated the imperial order, created an imperial stage drenched in jewels. Behind the grandeur sat a personal edge: in the hierarchy of crowns, an empress outranked a queen, and Victoria disliked the idea of being placed below Europe’s imperial titles, including her daughter’s future rank in Germany. At the same time, Indian princes began to commission pieces from European houses, asking them to remount traditional stones in modern settings. The dialogue between Indian taste and Parisian or London workshops gave birth to a distinct Indian influence in Western jewellery, visible in carved emeralds, ruby bead necklaces and turban inspired ornaments.
Japan opens to the world
In the mid nineteenth century Japan, after centuries of relative seclusion, was pressed to reopen to foreign trade. Japanese lacquer, metalwork and woodblock prints began to appear in Western markets and exhibition halls. This taste would later be called Japonisme, as Western observers embraced the fresh asymmetry, flat planes, and nature motifs they found in Japanese art. Jewellers quickly followed. Enamelled cherry blossoms, insects on patinated metal and sinuous branches in gold joined the visual vocabulary that would feed directly into Art Nouveau.
3. Migration and skills on the move
Diaspora
Protestant refugees from France, often referred to as Huguenots, brought expertise in fine metalwork, watchmaking and engraving to cities such as Geneva and London. Their presence strengthened local trades that later became internationally renowned. Because many European craft guilds excluded Jews, diamond cutting and trading, a craft that was not guild based in Amsterdam, became an important route into skilled work for Jewish communities there from the seventeenth century onwards. Jewish diamantaires were also a major presence in Antwerp’s diamond world, and displacement during the Second World War helped transplant parts of these networks to New York. In North Africa, by contrast, Jewish artisans were frequently prominent as silversmiths and goldsmiths, serving both Jewish and Muslim communities, and shaping regional jewellery traditions.
New centres of excellence
Migration rarely leaves visible traces on a jewel in the same way that a jewel depicting a comet records Halley (the recurring comet that returns roughly every 76 years, and whose appearances have repeatedly inspired distinctly recognisable motifs), yet it is one of the most powerful forces in the background. Workshops close in one place and quietly bloom in another. Techniques, business models and aesthetic preferences travel with people, carried in memory and practice, and can anchor new centres of excellence for generations.
4. New riches, new materials and new markets
External events also changed which materials were available, and at what price. Without these shifts in supply, technology and marketing, many familiar jewellery looks would simply have been impossible.
Gold rushes and diamond fields
The discovery of rich gold deposits in places such as California, followed by diamond finds in South Africa, brought large quantities of precious material into world markets. As more gold and diamonds became available, high carat gold jewels spread beyond court circles, and diamond set pieces grew in scale. Late nineteenth century parures of diamonds and silver topped gold owe as much to mining history as to artistic taste.
Precious stones from South America
Long before diamonds from South Africa reached Europe, South America had already transformed the supply of coloured stones. In what is now Colombia, indigenous communities were mining emeralds for many centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. From the sixteenth century onwards, emeralds from mines such as Muzo and Chivor entered the treasuries of Spain and, through trade and tribute, the jewel cases of other European courts. Their saturated green and the availability of relatively large stones helped to fix emeralds as one of the canonical precious stones in European taste and regalia.
Further south and east, Portuguese Brazil emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a major source of gold, diamonds, and later a widening range of coloured stones. From the early eighteenth century, Brazilian diamond mining brought large quantities of stones into European markets, and later Brazil produced remarkable aquamarines, topaz, tourmalines and other gems. These discoveries did not always create new styles by themselves, but they enlarged the palette of stones available to jewellers and allowed familiar forms to be remade in new colours and scales. In Portugal itself, the influx of Brazilian gold and stones helped underpin the opulence of eighteenth century court and devotional jewellery.
Those same tade routes also fed European cutting centres: by the nineteenth century, rough Brazilian agate reached Idar Oberstein (a German cutting and carving centre long associated with agate and other hardstones) in volume, sometimes carried as ballast on ships returning after unloading cargo in Brazil. Trade observers have long suggested that some Idar Oberstein families and firms built substantial stockpiles of rough, including agate and quartz varieties such as amethyst, with reserves said to last for generations.
Cultured pearls
For centuries natural pearls were among the rarest luxuries, limited by what divers could retrieve. That changed when cultured pearl techniques were developed and refined in Japan. The ability to farm pearls meant that long, perfectly graded strands, once the preserve of very few, now became an attainable aspiration for a much broader public. In the early twentieth century the classic rope of white pearls became a defining part of the modern feminine ideal.
Plastics and modern costume jewellery
The invention of early plastics, explored first as industrial materials and later as colourful decorative substances, opened a different path for jewellery. Before that, vulcanite (hardened vulcanised rubber) was moulded into black Victorian jewellery, often as an affordable substitute for jet. Later, materials such as Bakelite allowed bold blocks of colour, large sculptural forms and playful motifs at a fraction of the cost of precious stones. The rise of costume jewellery in the twentieth century, from simple bangles to witty figural brooches, is inseparable from this chemical and industrial story.
De Beers, Diamonds and a Modern Ritual
Engagement and the manufacture of expectation
In the mid twentieth century the meaning of diamonds was reshaped by a long running advertising strategy. In 1938, with demand depressed in the United States, De Beers (the diamond group that for much of the twentieth century dominated the global trade in rough diamonds through its centralised sales system) hired N. W. Ayer to build a mass association between diamonds, romance and engagement, and to persuade couples that a diamond should feel not optional but expected. The slogan “A Diamond is Forever”, coined for De Beers in 1947, condensed that message into a permanent link between a diamond and lifelong love. What had been one possible choice among many was pushed towards a social standard through the combined force of copywriting, film placements, public relations and consistent repetition. In my view, it helped create an unspoken expectation: men were meant to know that a diamond ring was the expected sign of their love, without their fiancées having to ask for it.
Eternity bands, alliance rings and anniversary gifting
Some twenty years later, a second market was deliberately cultivated. In the 1960s De Beers and N. W. Ayer promoted the diamond eternity band as an anniversary gift for married women, framed in the language of “recaptured love”. Structurally, it is a particularly efficient design for using many small stones, because its effect comes from a continuous line of repeated sparkle rather than from a single centre stone. In parts of continental Europe, closely related diamond set bands are often sold as alliance rings, and when stones cover only the upper part of the band, as half alliance rings. Journalist Edward Jay Epstein links this push to supply realities, arguing that the format conveniently absorbed large quantities of tiny Soviet diamonds that began entering De Beers’ sales system under confidential agreements from 1959 onwards.
Chanel and the rise of fashion jewellery
A little earlier, in the 1920s and 1930s, Coco Chanel (born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel) helped to legitimise costume jewellery. She mixed imitation pearls and glass stones with genuine pieces, treating both as equally valid tools of style. In her hands, a long rope of artificial pearls could be more modern and more daring than a conservative strand of natural ones. This attitude encouraged women to play with scale and quantity without being limited by budget, and it gave costume jewellery a new status as fashion in its own right rather than as a poor substitute for the real thing.
New gemstone discoveries and branded rarity
In the later twentieth century, a series of striking gemstone discoveries showed that the world still held surprises, even for seasoned dealers. These finds did not reshape everyday jewellery in the way that gold rushes or South African diamonds once did, but they created new objects of desire at the higher end of the market and demonstrated how strongly branding and storytelling can frame a stone.
In the 1960s, a vivid blue violet variety of zoisite was found in northern Tanzania. When Tiffany & Co. agreed to promote the gem internationally, they renamed it tanzanite after its country of origin and launched it in 1968 with an advertising campaign that presented it as the most beautiful blue gemstone discovered in two thousand years. Yet jewellers also had to reckon with durability. At around 6 to 7 on the Mohs scale (a comparative scale of scratch hardness), and with cleavage, tanzanite can chip if struck, so it benefits from protective settings and careful wear. Many jewellers therefore consider it safest in earrings and pendants, while rings demand extra protection and a more cautious wearing style.
In Brazil, a prospector’s conviction that something unusual lay hidden in the hills of Paraíba state was rewarded in the 1980s with the discovery of copper bearing tourmaline in an almost neon blue to blue green. The so called Paraíba tourmaline reached the market in the late 1980s and immediately attracted attention for its electric colour and extreme scarcity. Prices rose rapidly, and the stone became a textbook example of how a newly recognised variety, tied to a specific locality, can redefine expectations of what a tourmaline can be.
Around the same time, work in the Wah Wah Mountains of Utah brought another geological curiosity into the jeweller’s vocabulary: red beryl, sometimes marketed as “red emerald”. Although the mineral was already known to science, it was only in the later 1950s that a deposit with facetable (suitable for cutting into gemstones), gem quality material was identified. Very few stones of usable size have ever been recovered, making red beryl far rarer in the market than diamond. Its importance lies less in the number of jewels that contain it than in the way it illustrates a modern fascination with extreme rarity and with gems known from a single, almost mythical source.
5. Changing bodies and modern lifestyles
From corsets to sportswear
Jewellery lives on the body, so changes in dress, textiles and daily life naturally alter what is practical and desirable to wear. This has been true in every period: as bodies, clothes and routines change, jewellery adapts with them.
In the nineteenth century many women’s bodies were shaped by corsets, heavy skirts and elaborate hairstyles. Jewels were designed to sit on high bodices, to fasten shawls and to decorate carefully arranged hair. Around 1900, and more strongly after the First World War, silhouettes became lighter and more relaxed. Sport, travel and paid work entered more lives, and shorter hair and simpler necklines appeared.
Collars no longer needed heavy brooches to close them, but wrists became visible and inviting for bracelets and wristwatches. The shift from the pocket watch to the wristwatch during and after the First World War turned a functional instrument into a daily ornament. Earrings evolved to suit changing hairstyles, from long drops that peep out below an updo to discreet studs that sit close to the face. Behind these design changes stand practical questions: whether a jewel will catch on fabric, impede movement, and how it reads in a world where people travel, work and socialise in new ways.
6. Revolutions, grief and war
Not all forces that shape jewellery are hopeful or glamorous. Revolutions, personal loss and global conflict also change what people are willing, or even allowed, to wear.
Revolution and restraint
During times of political upheaval, ostentatious display can become dangerous. For example, the French Revolution disrupted court life and made heavy baroque and rococo splendour politically suspect. Under these pressures, taste shifted towards cleaner, classical lines. Jewels became lighter, with cameos, intaglios and simple chains that could read as patriotic modesty as much as fashion.
Queen Victoria and the culture of mourning
In the nineteenth century, few emotional events influenced jewellery more than the death of Prince Albert in 1861. Queen Victoria’s prolonged mourning, widely publicised and widely imitated, turned dark clothing and sombre jewels into a visible language of loyalty and grief. Whitby jet, black enamel, hairwork and memorial lockets became a whole category of jewelled objects. Mourning jewellery had existed before, but Victoria’s example made it far more widespread and, in practice, more rule bound.
From the late twentieth century onwards, and especially from the 1980s, elements of this Victorian mourning aesthetic became a reference point for gothic and neo Victorian style, where black dress and mourning codes are reimagined as fashion.
The First World War and a taste for modernity
The First World War was both a human catastrophe and a technological turning point. Precious metals were diverted to military use, economies struggled, and many traditional clients disappeared. Some jewellers turned to lighter materials and smaller pieces. After the war, there was a strong appetite for a new beginning. The crisp geometry and bright colours of Art Deco can be read, in part, as a reaction to trauma and a desire for order, speed and modern life.
Protest, reform and jewellery as a badge
Political and social movements have often used jewellery as a portable banner. Small items worn every day can turn a private conviction into a public statement, visible yet sometimes deniable.
In the years before the First World War, the campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain developed a distinctive visual identity, and jewellery became one of its most effective tools. Supporters wore brooches, pendants, badges and hatpins in the Women’s Social and Political Union colours of purple, white and green. These colours were commonly explained as standing for dignity or loyalty in purple, purity in white and hope in green. In jewellery, the palette was often rendered as green, white and violet, and a later mnemonic (a memory aid) read those initials as “Give Women Votes”. Yet jewellery did offer campaigners a practical way to recognise one another and to signal political engagement in a form that could be worn in everyday life.
In the twentieth century, new protest movements also turned to wearable symbols. The well known round peace sign was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and it quickly appeared on lapel badges and pendants before spreading worldwide as a general emblem of peace. Alongside this, anti militarist groups adopted the image of a broken rifle, a symbol that predates the Second World War and was later taken up by organisations such as War Resisters’ International. Worn on the body, these small motifs announced a commitment to peace that might otherwise have remained invisible.
The Second World War, tank bracelets and victory metals
The Second World War once again redirected precious metals away from jewellery. In the United States, War Production Board regulations restricted platinum for non military use, and in other markets platinum was also reserved for industrial and military applications. Gold was subject to controls and high taxes, while silver and base metals became substitutes. Jewellers experimented with alternative alloys and with palladium, one of the platinum group metals (a family of six related metals known as the platinum group metals, including platinum itself).
At the same time, the visual language of war left clear marks on design. One of the most characteristic forms of the 1940s is the tank bracelet, a bold, articulated gold bracelet whose tiered, block like links were often associated with the tracks and profiles of armoured vehicles and other machinery. These pieces look massive, but many are cleverly constructed with hollow components to reduce the amount of gold used while keeping an impression of strength and solidity. Together with jewels in patriotic colours and stylised military motifs, they define much of what is now grouped under the Retro style and show how even conflict can be transmuted into ornaments of confidence and power.
7. Mass media icons and popular culture
Jewellery in the age of images
From the later twentieth century onwards, mass media added a new force to the world of jewellery. A single photograph, a television appearance or a music video could turn one jewel into a global model.
Princess Diana and the sapphire cluster ring
One of the clearest examples is the sapphire cluster engagement ring chosen by Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Rather than being a unique royal commission, the ring was selected from Garrard’s existing designs. Its oval blue sapphire, surrounded by a halo of diamonds, became instantly recognisable as the world watched the engagement of the young nursery assistant to the Prince of Wales. In the years that followed, sapphire cluster engagement rings became a mainstream aspiration, reviving a nineteenth century form for a late twentieth century audience. When the same ring later appeared on the hand of Catherine, Princess of Wales, the design gained a second life and confirmed how strongly a single jewel, worn by a highly visible figure, can shape popular taste.
Ice, hip hop and a new language of display
From the late twentieth century onward, another powerful current emerged from an unexpected direction. Hip hop culture turned heavy chains, oversized pendants and later gem set dental grills into highly visible statements of identity and success. Photographs, music videos and album covers spread this aesthetic far beyond the neighbourhoods where it was born.
In this world of so called ice, slang for diamonds, the thickness of a Cuban link chain or the density of diamonds on a pendant can signal not only wealth, but also resilience and the desire to transform hardship into self defined splendour. Rappers and producers commissioned increasingly complex custom pieces, often telling personal stories in gold and stones. Specialist jewellers, once anonymous workshop figures, became famous in their own right, known by name in lyrics and interviews. Museum exhibitions and major publications now treat hip hop jewellery as a distinct chapter in jewellery history, which underlines how a musical genre has reshaped ideas of masculine adornment and luxury on a global scale.
8. Science, wonder and the sky
Sometimes a single natural spectacle can launch a small but striking fashion. The periodic return of Halley’s Comet, visible to the naked eye, did just that. When the comet appeared in 1835 and 1910, newspapers, prints and popular science turned it into an event. Jewellers responded with brooches and pendants that showed a blazing star with a long trailing tail.
These comet jewels capture a particular blend of fear, curiosity and delight in modern science, worn literally on the breast. They remind us that even the sky above can leave a trace in metal and stones, and that jewellery is quick to respond when the wider public turns its gaze upward.
9. Drawing the threads together
The forces we have examined here are not styles in themselves. They are pressures, shocks and opportunities that altered the environment in which jewellers worked and clients chose. Some were genuinely transformative. Others sprang from grand ambition, or conversely, from private insecurity, yet both could leave a trace in jewellery. Some produced brief hypes, others set patterns that endured for decades. Excavations reopened conversations with the ancient world. Empires and exhibitions brought distant cultures into European salons. Migration moved skills and traditions from one city to another. New materials flooded the market or created new categories of affordable ornament. Political upheavals, social movements and wars constrained or redirected taste. Mass media and music culture elevated certain jewels into icons. Even the night sky contributed fleeting motifs.
Purpose of This Page
This page offers a conceptual overview of the forces that shaped jewellery, key events and influences, within the context of jewellery history and design. It is written from within the jewellery discipline and focuses on what helps the reader see, compare, and interpret jewels, rather than aiming to be a full encyclopaedia. This page forms part of the lecture series “A Journey Through the World of Jewellery” and points towards deeper study through Adin’s jewellery glossary, specialised library, and style overview timeline. Use and sharing for educational purposes are welcomed. If you reference or quote this page, please mention Adin as your source.
Accuracy Note
Every effort has been made to present this information accurately and in line with current historical understanding. Interpretations may evolve as new research becomes available, and readers who notice points for refinement are welcome to share their insights.
Author Attribution
Elkan Wijnberg, Jewellery Historian and Antique Jewellery Specialist – Adin – www.antiquejewel.com