“Pearls go on and on . . . on everything,” Vogue declared in 1943, but we could’ve just as easily been talking about the recent Spring shows. This was a season in which iconic wardrobe pieces—the trench, the pin-stripe suit, the pearl—were given a makeover. To have impact, these “remakes” must both acknowledge and reject the rich symbolism of the original. There are many signifiers attached to luminescent pearls, which, through time, have represented both purity and power even as they provoke. As jewelry historian Vivienne Becker puts it in Assouline and Mikimoto’s richly illustrated new book, The Pearl Necklace, “It has offered an irresistible invitation to subversive reinterpretation.” In other words, if the viewer didn’t know and accept pearls’ traditional association with propriety—and by extension, the posh—the punch line would be missing when Moschino embellished paper doll dresses with pearl strands.   Pearls don’t have the flash of diamonds (candy to material girls), but they are undeniably precious and celebrated for being so. The rarity of the (natural) pearl, formed as an oyster’s reaction to an irritant, has made it an object of wonder and value since ancient times. As nature’s sunken treasures, pearls were one of the least democratic of gems; but they became more so as methods to culture pearls were developed. These were perfected in Japan by Kokichi Mikimoto, who, gemologist Fred Ward says, “revolutionized pearling,” both in terms of invention and marketing. It’s Coco Chanel, though, who can be credited with showing us how to wear pearls in a modern manner, and to whom Undercover’s Jun Takahashi nodded in his Spring collection. Like Queen Elizabeth and many a maharani, Chanel had real pearls, but she didn’t scoff at man-made ones (or paste stones, either). Rather, she piled on her necklaces with abandon, mixing real and what Vogue called “bravura” jewelry. Interestingly, Becker describes Chanel’s pearl-wearing as a kind of “parody of the great pearl necklaces of the Belle Époque that she had seen from afar, as a teenager growing up in an orphanage.” Talk about things coming full circle! Here, a slideshows of girls in pearls on the Spring runways. Mikimoto’s The Pearl Necklace (Assouline), with text by Vivienne Becker, is now on sale.    

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