Jewellery Stories
Queen for a Night
On Belle Époque Jewellery Etiquette and the Significance of an Unusual Tiara
by Lea Felicitas Döding
Jewellery – a Mirror of the Past
‘Cloth is a social tissue’, remarked feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her sociological study The Dress of Women in 1915, looking back onto the etiquette of dress that had formed during the Belle Époque – the prosperous age of relative peace between 1871 and 1914, at least from a Western perspective.1
Indeed, Gilman’s statement seems especially true to this era, so notorious for its complex web of social conventions that extended into every area of life, including dress and jewellery – the so-called toilette. Subtle rules – called the bon ton – governed the kinds of gowns and jewels a woman might wear for running errands, for calling on friends or visiting the theatre. If she abided by these rules, she would successfully defend her family’s rank in society. If she failed, mockery, scorn and exclusion would follow, as countless articles in contemporary newspapers and fashion magazines attest.
Martha L. Rayne, Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette, 1881. During the Belle Époque, growing bourgeois wealth allowed more and more people access to luxuries; etiquette books and articles allowed those who had not grown up on subtle societal conventions to navigate society.
In 1881, for instance, a German lady-in-waiting reported of a garden party at which a young woman who was still unfamiliar with the bon ton committed a terrible faux pas by wearing opulent diamond jewellery during the daytime rather than reserving it for the evening:
I shall never forget my horror when the little, lovely woman appeared glistening with brilliants which she had paired with a pink summer dress. I felt awfully sorry for her, for naturally, she was the subject of the other ladies’ mockery [...]. The next time I met the young woman under four eyes, I bade her gently to fashion her toilette after the example of the ladies of the residence; I told her I would always be happy to advise her prior to any event.2
As we can see, these rules were essentially enforced by peer pressure. But humans are social animals, and thus such rules were usually strictly abided by, for the fear of judgement and exclusion was too great. Therefore, conventions that strike us as unimaginably restrictive today are invaluable to the historian. For if the bon ton could dictate what a woman wore – then with thorough knowledge of the bon ton, we may in turn derive important information from any given item of jewellery.
We may deduce what kind of person may have worn it, on what occasion, and what she hoped to communicate. This is the case with an unusual tiara – a tiara that only appears unusual, however, once one considers it against the subtle background of Belle Époque jewellery etiquette.
Like Day and Night: More than a Subtle Difference
An unusual silver, garnet and split pearl tiara, c. 1885.
The tiara in question is a concoction of silver, garnets, and natural pearls, with an undeniably gothic allure to its dramatic accord of snow white, blood red, and (almost) ebony. Two winged dragon-like creatures with serpentine bodies are its defining and most striking elements. For ornaments, the silver has been beaten into delicate knife wires, arranged into foliate swirls pavé-set with pearls, their ends mounted with claw-set garnets. A central garnet and pearl cluster motif is surmounted by a fan-like ornament in knife wires.
Its design and craftsmanship place the piece firmly in the late nineteenth century, particularly the 1880s or early 1890s. The comparison with extant examples and published designs consolidates this estimated date and allows us to refine it to circa 1885. A similar pattern was published in the Parisian Le Bijou in 1884, although here, griffins take the place of dragons, and the design appears to be for a piece executed in diamonds and large pearls. Our tiara, on the other hand, is not fashioned in large diamonds and heavy silver-topped gold.
A comparison piece from the Parisian design book Le Bijou, 1884.
In fact, its very materiality presents us with somewhat of a conundrum where etiquette is concerned. Because, on the one hand, it is a tiara – a piece which, at the time, was exclusively worn for formal evening affairs: the tiara ‘obliges its wearer to elegance in the extreme, which is why it is best worn to a grand gala, with “full dress”’.3 On the other hand, however, silver, garnets and small split pearls (distinct from large, costly pearls!) were strictly non-formal and associated with daytime wear from the 1880s onwards.
Indeed, any student of antique jewellery will have picked up on the fact that it is extremely rare to see Belle Époque tiaras rendered in any materials but diamonds, large natural pearls, costly precious stones – or imitations thereof, which had become socially acceptable by the 1890s. Yet our garnets and pearls do not pretend to be anything than that which they are.
The etiquette of jewellery remained largely the same from the 1880s through early 1900s, and was highly similar throughout Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, since during this period of first globalization, these countries were also linked by a flourishing trade between their respective jewellery industries.
A detail of the tiara, c. 1885.
Let us, for a moment, consider the conventions surrounding garnets and small pearls, so as to understand the tiara’s significance. Being decorative yet relatively inexpensive, garnets were considered modest and thus worn during the daytime. As recommended the German Bazar in 1894:
For simple jewellery, one often employs Bohemian garnets, which oftentimes may be of extraordinary beauty and can also be of considerable value. And yet, the effect of garnet jewellery is only modest even when most artfully made, so that these pieces are to be recommended for daily use.4
Indeed, garnets were only considered appropriate to the ‘common, though not very festive toilette’.5 One might run errands in a garnet brooch, or visit a close friend. In France, too, ‘garnets from Auvergne’ were recommended for ‘the afternoon toilette: visits, promenades, exhibitions, charity sales’.6 None of these occasions would have warranted the wearing of a tiara; in fact, its wearer might have been publicly mocked, as we initially noted.
Garnet and seed pearl jewellery was considered appropriate for daytime wear from the 1880s through early 1900s.
Seed pearls set en pavé in gold or silver, too, came to be associated with daytime wear and even its most casual mode, the so-called street toilette. As reported the American Jewelers’ Circular in 1899: ‘An extremely swell girl, every detail of whose street toilette breathed correctness and distinction, was noted the other day, wearing securely pinned at the back of her head the Spring-like fancy of a tiny spray of lilies-of-the-valley in gold and pearls.’7
When seed pearls are used in conjunction with coloured stones, the latter are usually of the type then called ‘semi-precious’ and worn during the daytime, such as peridots, amethysts, or – garnets.
Tiaras and diamond jewellery were reserved for formal evening wear. Examples for fine jewellery to be worn with ball gowns, Deutsche Goldschmiedezeitung, 13 (1910), p. 85.
Yet what of the jewels for formal evenings at important balls or the opera, where one might wear a tiara? Here, the etiquette was rather simple: diamonds, precious stones, and large, costly pearls. ‘The true etiquette of wearing jewelry is about as follows: [...] At dinners, receptions, the opera, weddings, and dress concerts, diamonds or pearls’, advised an American etiquette manual in 1881.8
‘Naturally, pearls and all precious gemstones are preferred for the grande toilette [= the formal evening wardrobe], particularly diamonds in such abundance as have hardly been seen before’, added a German women’s magazine in 1892.9 And in 1896, the French La Vie Parisienne described a typical night of Parisian elegance to its readers:
And diamonds everywhere: it already takes quite a few to simply adorn a silk dress; flounces of antique lace glittering with diamonds, encircling a décolleté; rivers of diamonds, rubies and pearls hemming another low-cut bodice or used as trimming along the front, amidst the blur of silk chiffon pleats, bodices embroidered with gems, and always epaulettes of diamonds, of pearls [...].10
And so, if its materiality spells modesty and daytime affairs, yet its very shape destines it for the lavish evening wardrobe – then what can we make of our tiara?
A Renaissance Style Tiara – for a Renaissance Costume?
There was one type of social evening occasion at which the conventions of dress and jewellery were temporarily lifted: the costume or fancy dress ball. Much like the masked ball, fancy dress slightly eased the pressure of social class and convention. Therefore, during an age in which the corsetry of social convention was laced rather suffocatingly, fancy dress balls became exceedingly popular, and many were held every season.
Design for a butterfly costume for a fancy dress ball. Der Bazar, 36 (13 January 1890), p. 25.
Women’s illustrated newspapers, fashion magazines, even entire books advised its readers on how to dress as certain characters, many of them lifted from legend, mythology, the pages of novels or history books.
In books such as Fancy Dresses Described; or What to wear at Fancy Balls (1887), we find numerous ideas for costumes, along with suggestions for the appropriate jewellery to wear. Of course, one might find a place for the display of one’s conventional Belle Époque jewels – which, after all, were largely modelled after 18th century styles – if one dressed as Marie Antoinette.
But more often, jewellery for fancy dress departed from the regular conventions surrounding evening wear. One could even put any aspirations to elegance and dignity aside entirely, raid one’s collection of outdated novelty jewellery and dress in humorous costumes such as a post office: in this case, one must wear ‘flowers for the hair made of postage stamps’ and ‘enamelled postage-stamps for jewellery’.11
Thus, it is possible that our tiara might have been commissioned for a costume ball, which would explain the discrepancy between the degree of formality insinuated by its materiality, and that decreed by its form. In particular, there are several points that suggest it was conceived as the finishing touch to a Renaissance costume.
Comparison of the dragon element in our tiara with a grotesque by an anonymous Renaissance printmaker after Cornelis Bos, c. 1516-1556 (Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1891-A-16200).
For one thing, the dragon ornaments rather clearly owe their inspiration to the ornamental prints of the Renaissance, so-called grotesques teeming with mythical beasts commonly shown in profile. A fine example can be found as a detail in a grotesque by an anonymous printmaker after Cornelis Bos, c. 1516-56 (Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1891-A-16200). More specifically, the creatures accord to the lindworm type, a dragon-like creature with serpentine body, occasionally winged, from old Norse and German mythology.
But its materiality, too, might link the tiara to a Renaissance costume: for it is possible that it was created and first worn in Germany, where we also acquired it. Whereas British Holbeinesque Renaissance revival pieces tended to be made in gold and colourful gemstones, German pieces in the Renaissance Style favoured silver, garnets, and occasionally seed pearls. One reason was that the Renaissance was associated with German virtues such as modesty and reason, to whose expression silver and garnets lent themselves more readily than gold and diamonds.
Detail of a typical German Renaissance revival necklace in silver and garnets, c. 1880.
Indeed, this idealistic value of Renaissance style jewellery is also expressed in contemporary jewellery etiquette. In 1888, for instance, the German Bazar advised its readers to wear ‘a silver necklace with a cross pendant in the solemn style of the Renaissance’ to church,12 where the occasion and the early hour required extreme demureness and modesty.
Likewise, German brides could appear before the altar in Renaissance style silver jewellery, even though brides were otherwise advised to wear no jewellery, or only the most modest of pieces. Due to their historically charged significance and materiality, Renaissance style pieces were thought to cater to demands of modesty, despite the fact that many a German Renaissance revival necklace does not appear particularly modest to modern eyes.
In Germany, the Renaissance revival peaked between the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 and the mid-1880s, by which time more typical pieces of Belle Époque era production began to dominate the market: knife wires and swirling designs that functioned mainly as vessels for the new-found wealth of precious stones, but also revived and appropriated 18th century designs. With its combination of Renaissance-derived grotesques and typical Belle Époque elements, our unusual tiara is situated right at the threshold between these two.
Queen for a Night
Our tiara combines Renaissance-derived grotesques with typical contemporary elements of the 1880s.
But who would have worn such a piece? Costume balls were held in various degrees of sumptuousness, from small-town events all the way up into the highest circles of society.
One of the most legendary society events of the Belle Époque was the Devonshire House Ball of 1897, whose illustrious guests included the Prince and Princess of Wales as well as the Czar and Czarina of Russia. And only a rather significant occasion with high-ranking guests would have warranted the commission of a tiara that could have been worn a few times at best (for the tiara is rather too unusual, and limited in its application, to have been part of the regular offering of a jeweller).
Yet that does not mean that its wearer was necessarily an aristocrat. At such events, aristocrats and wealthy industrialists mingled, and she may have been born to, or have married into, a wealthy upper class family as well. During the Belle Époque, a tiara was no longer strictly an emblem of nobility.
A typical diamond tiara of the 1880s in the popular wild rose design, convertible to a necklace.
Indeed, it had become a regular part of grand evening wear, functioning merely as ‘an attribute of beauty and luxury’, commented a correspondent of the German Goldschmiede-Zeitung in 1906: ‘And even if the aristocrats by birth would like to believe that they alone are entitled to wear this most effective of all ornaments, they cannot prevent any millionaire from braiding a fortune into her hair.’13
A costume ball with a Renaissance theme was held at the German Crown Prince's palace in Berlin in 1875. Here: a scene from the ball as illustrated in Der Bazar, 21 (1875), p. 378.
Neither was the Renaissance style linked to aristocratic notions. In fact, the Renaissance was seen as a golden era of the free burgher, a fact that now, in the age of industrialism, appeared particularly appealing. This does not mean, however, that the Renaissance was only popular with the bourgeois. We must remember that Imperial Germany was a federal monarchy consisting of several states, and to hint at a shared history through the revival of significant styles imposed a sense of unity that was desirable even by the highest-ranking aristocrats. In 1875, for instance, the German Crown Prince gave a Renaissance-themed costume ball at his palace in Berlin.
As such, the mere fact of the piece being a tiara in the Renaissance style gives us no hint about the social rank of its first wearer, other than the fact that she came from a wealthy background, moved in the higher circles of society – and, without the shadow of a doubt, liked to make a grand entrance.
1Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Dress of Women, repr. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 3.
2E. v. Hohenheim, ‘Die Toilettenfrage’, Der Bazar, 27 (25 April 1881), 126-127, p. 127.
3Ada Robert, ‘Diademe’, Deutsche Goldschmiede-Zeitschrift, 1906, 1-3, p. 2.
4Der Bazar, 40 (1894), p. 57.
5[Anon]: ‘Einsegnung’, Schmuck und Mode, February 1901, n. p. (p. 3).
6Baronne Staffe, Les Hochets féminins: les pierres précieuses, les bijoux, la dentelle, la broderie, l’éventail, quelques autres superfluités (Paris: Flammarion, 1902), p. 211.
7Elsie Bee, ‘Fashions in Jewelry, Silver Ware, Bric-à-Brac, Etc.’, The Jewelers’ Circular, 1 March 1899, p. 7.
8M. L. Rayne, Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette (Detroit: Tyler & Co., 1881), p. 292.
9Fr. Fr., ‘Neue Schmucksachen’, Der Bazar, 38 (1892), p. 474.
10Svelt, ‘Élégances Parisiennes’, La Vie Parisienne, 96 (28 November 1896), 689-690, p. 689.
11Ardern Holt, Fancy Dresses Described; or What to wear at Fancy Balls (London: Debenham & Freebody, 1883), p. 206. See also our article on Novelty Jewellery.
12R. T., ‘Moderner Schmuck zur Badesaison’, Der Bazar, 34 (1888), p. 278.
13Ada Robert, ‘Diademe’, Deutsche Goldschmiede-Zeitschrift, 1906, 1-3, p. 2.
Lea Felicitas Döding
As an art historian, I am primarily interested in the material culture of jewellery. Who would have worn a piece, when and why? What was the cultural significance of certain gemstones and jewellery designs? These are the questions I attempt to solve for the Hofer Magazine, and which often lead me into the depths of jewellery history.
