As The Collector’s Companion enters its thirtieth year, we thought we’d mark our pearl anniversary by taking a look at some.
Such is the history and beauty of pearls, they could easily hold a purely mythical status alongside unicorns and mermaids. Literature has frequently attributed their formation to tears or dew drops, which goes back to early documents such as the first century natural history works of Pliny the Elder* where he wrote that the fruit of shell fishes were “better or worse, great or small, according to the qualitie and quantitie of the dew which they received”. Whether the pearl was clear or muddy in colour, fair or dull, was dependent on the weather at the time of conception. This belief lasted for over fifteen hundred years amongst the scholars of Europe.
*Natural History, Pliny the Elder. Translated to English by Philemon Holland in 1601.
And precious the tea as that rain from the sky,
Thomas Moore
Which turns into pearls as it falls in the sea
The liquid drops of tears that you have shed,
Richard III, Shakespeare
Shall come again, transform’d to orient pearl
For centuries pearls passed from hands to neck among the highest in society, their value making them unobtainable for most. The Roman historian Suetonius documented a number of instances of pearls changing hands that demonstrated their value. He wrote of Caesar presenting his mistress, Servilia, with a pearl valued at six million sestertii. To put that in perspective, your average Roman legionary soldier earned around 900 sestertii a year. Some hundred years later, the Roman general Vitellius paid the expenses of a military campaign by selling one of his mother’s earrings. Suetonius wrote, “Atque ex aure matris dctractum unioncm pigncra-verit ad itineris impensas.” And the union extracted from the mother’s ear will be invested towards the expenses of the journey.
Multiple rulers/governments have placed restrictions on the ownership of pearls throughout history. The Venetian Senate of the Middle Ages were particularly strict, enacting in 1599 that any woman, “after the expiration of fifteen years from the day of her first marriage, shall lay aside the string of pearls around her neck and shall not wear or use […] this string or any other kind of pearls or anything which imitates pearls, neither in this city nor in any other city or place within our dominion, under the irremissible penalty of two hundred ducats.” Ten years later, this was reduced to just ten years.
“Such a gift is not fitting for you to give: and not to receive me; remember, we belong to the middle class.”
Print by Reinier Vinkeles, Netherlands 1803. ➂
In case you’d never thought about it, in a nut shell, this is how pearls are made. When an irritant particle finds its way inside of a living shelled mollusc, instead of being able to expel it, the mollusc secretes layers of nacre (the calcium carbonate better known as mother-of-pearl) around the irritant, building up over time to form a pearl. There’s only a one in 10,000 chance of such an event occuring and even less of a chance that the resulting pearl will be aesthetically pleasing, so it is no wonder that pearls were valued so highly.
Pearls only became attainable to the middle classes with Japanese developments in cultured/farmed pearls, notably by Kokichi Mikimoto, who, in 1916, purchased a patent from fellow pearl researchers/innovators (the Mise-Nishikawa method) to establish a business which by 1935 had created an industry that was producing 10 million cultured pearls a year.
Cultured pearls begin their formation due to a man-inserted irritant, usually a small bead made of shell. Coloured minerals can also be inserted to created pearls in tinted colours.
Despite Mikimoto’s long history in pearls, they have embraced the newest trend of pearls in menswear. Partnering with Comme des Garçons in 2022, they launched a unisex collection of pearl necklaces aimed towards men. Pearls were paired with chunky chains and safety pins.
While currently fashionable, pearls being worn by men is of course, not “new”, because like tunics/dresses, tights and wigs, it’s all been done before, it only depends on how far back through fashion history you wish to look.
Earlier this year the newest jewellery collaboration between Pharrell Williams and Tiffany & Co. was launched, featuring Tahitian black pearls and Poseidon’s trident-style spike rondelles.
Frequent pearl sightings on male celebrities including Harry Styles, Justin Beiber, Billy Porter and Timothée Chalamet cements the pearl’s status as modern, trendy and genderless, about as far away from the quintessential image of the 1950s perfect housewife as you could get.
Sources:
➀ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
➁ Birmingham Museums Trust
➂ Rikjsmuseum
➃ Getty
➄ Smithsonian