THE NINE MOMENTS THAT MADE THE PEARL

In 1996, a three-strand pearl necklace went to auction in New York with an estimate of five hundred dollars. It was not made of pearls. The beads were glass and paste, worth almost nothing, and everyone in the room knew it. It sold for 211,500 dollars.

That single figure is the whole argument of this article. A pearl is nacre, and nacre is cheap or expensive depending on where it grew. But a pearl is also the last thing a king wore, the object a film star found in a dog's mouth, the necklace a woman put on the night she decided to stop being polite. Value lives in the story. What follows are the nine moments that gave the pearl the story it still carries, and if you want the material underneath the mythology, our guide to freshwater pearl jewellery is the place for that.

Elizabeth I: The Pearl As Argument

Look at any state portrait of Elizabeth I and count the pearls. There are hundreds, sewn into the gown, roped across the bodice, threaded through the hair. None of them are decoration. The Royal Museums Greenwich, which holds the Armada Portrait, is blunt about it: the pearls symbolise the queen's chastity and connect her to Cynthia, the moon goddess, who was virgin and therefore read as pure.

This is the origin of everything the pearl would later be accused of. Before Elizabeth, a pearl meant wealth. After her, it meant a moral quality in the person wearing it. Every bridal strand, every christening gift, every accusation that pearls are prim descends from a sixteenth century public relations campaign run by a woman who understood that her own body was a document.

Charles I: The Earring That Outlived The King

In 1649 Charles I walked to a scaffold in Whitehall wearing a pearl drop in one ear. The earring survived him. The Victoria and Albert Museum put it on display in its Pearls exhibition in 2013, described exactly that way: a pearl-drop earring worn by Charles I at his execution.

Keep that image in mind for the last section of this article, because it dismantles the assumption that a pearl is a feminine object. It was not confiscated and it was not melted down. A piece of vanity became a piece of political memory, and it did so on a man.

Kokichi Mikimoto: The End Of The Accident

The most important person in the history of pearls was not a queen. He was the son of a noodle shop owner in Toba, Japan. In 1893, Kokichi Mikimoto succeeded in culturing the first semi-spherical pearl, and about a decade later he was producing perfectly round ones. He opened a pearl shop in Ginza in 1899 and moved it in 1906 to the corner it still occupies, as Sotheby's records.

Before him a pearl was a piece of luck pulled out of the sea, which is why crowns owned them and nobody else did. After him it was something that could be grown, and the V&A puts the consequence plainly: the cultured pearl became affordable for every woman to wear. There is no Chanel wearing pearls with a day dress without Mikimoto. There is no pearl trend of any kind without Mikimoto.

The detail worth keeping: touring Europe and America in 1927, he is said to have met Thomas Edison, who told him this was not a cultured pearl, it was a real pearl. It took the century's most famous inventor to say out loud what the trade spent decades resisting.

Sofia Godinho

Coco Chanel: Value Separated From Price

Chanel did not invent the fake pearl. What she did was harder and more interesting: she made it unembarrassing. Her costume jewellery was considered radical in the 1920s, and she worked with Suzanne Gripoix on irregular glass pearls, later with Fulco di Verdura and, from 1954, with Robert Goossens. All of that is documented by Sotheby's, which also preserves her own line on the subject: costume jewellery is not made to provoke desire, only astonishment at most, and it must remain an ornament and an amusement.

Read that again, because it is the most modern sentence anyone has written about jewellery. She is arguing that a piece can be serious about design and unserious about material at the same time. Once that idea exists, the question stops being what a pearl cost and becomes whether the woman wearing it has any taste.

Elizabeth Taylor And La Peregrina

La Peregrina, the wanderer, is a pear-shaped pearl found in the Gulf of Panama in the sixteenth century and given to Philip II of Spain, who wrote it into the Spanish crown jewels. It appears in Velazquez portraits. In January 1969, Richard Burton bought it at auction for 37,000 dollars as a Valentine's present for Elizabeth Taylor.

A note, because this error appears even in books: it did not belong to Mary Tudor. Burton believed it did. The pearl in Mary's portraits is a different one, and La Peregrina is only documented from 1579, more than twenty years after Mary's death.

Then Las Vegas. At Caesars Palace the pearl slipped its setting and Taylor searched the suite in a rising panic before noticing one of her puppies chewing something. In her own account, she opened the dog's mouth and inside was the most perfect pearl in the world, and thank God it was not scratched. She had Cartier build her a new necklace around it, designed with Al Durante.

On 13 December 2011, that necklace sold at Christie's in New York for 11,842,500 dollars, against an estimate of two to three million, after more than twenty bids and about four and a half minutes of bidding. It set a world auction record for a pearl jewel. In forty-two years the price had multiplied more than three hundred times, and the nacre had not changed at all. What appreciated was the story.

Audrey Hepburn: The Most Famous Pearls In The World Are Fake

The opening frames of Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961 gave us the single most reproduced image of a woman in pearls: the black dress, the sunglasses, the five-strand necklace. Givenchy designed the dress. He did not make the necklace. The pearls were created by the French costume jeweller Roger Scemama, and, as Vogue Philippines sets out, they were not real.

It suits the character perfectly. Holly Golightly is a woman in the middle of inventing herself, and she does it in costume jewellery. The image that taught the twentieth century what elegance looked like was, materially speaking, worth very little.

Jacqueline Kennedy: Five Hundred Dollars, Two Hundred And Eleven Thousand

Which brings us back to where we started. The three-strand necklace Jacqueline Kennedy wore constantly as First Lady was faux. It came up as lot 454 in the 1996 estate sale at Sotheby's with an estimate of five hundred to seven hundred dollars, and it sold for 211,500 dollars to the Franklin Mint, which then produced more than 130,000 reproductions and donated the original to the Smithsonian, where it is today. All of it is on Sotheby's own record.

The catalogue included a photograph of her small son playing with those pearls at her neck. That photograph is what sold. Not the object.

Diana: The Night A Pearl Choker Meant Defiance

Diana owned a sapphire and diamond brooch, a wedding gift from the Queen Mother, and she had it set into the centre of a seven-strand pearl choker. On 29 June 1994 she wore it to a Vanity Fair dinner at the Serpentine Gallery, with a black off-the-shoulder silk dress by Christina Stambolian that she had owned for three years and never worn, believing it too daring. That same evening, Prince Charles admitted his infidelity on national television.

For four centuries the pearl had meant obedience. For one evening it meant the opposite, and the reversal was understood instantly by everyone who saw the photographs. Stambolian later compared her to Odile, the black swan, and said simply that she was clearly angry.

It remains the only occasion in modern history when a pearl necklace was read publicly as an act of war.

Vivienne Westwood: The Pearl, Repossessed

Autumn Winter 1990, a collection called Portrait. Westwood sent out a three-row pearl drop choker with ninety-two glass-based pearls made by Swarovski, hand-knotted, with a brass orb sitting dead centre. She had been looking at eighteenth century French painting and furniture in the Wallace Collection, and she has explained her thinking on the brand's own heritage pages: she thought a single pearl earring, or three strands with a drop at the middle, was typical of all jewellery, and she wanted the pieces to be complete and as archetypal as they could be.

That is the move. She did not reject the bourgeois pearl necklace, she took it and stamped her own planet on it. Rejection dates quickly. Repossession lasts, which is why that choker is still on necks thirty-six years later.

Harry Styles, And The Men Coming Back

At the 2019 Met Gala, whose theme was Camp, Harry Styles arrived in a sheer Gucci blouse and a single pearl earring. His stylist Harry Lambert told Vogue that everyone had expected sequins, bright colours and a crown, and that they had chosen a different kind of camp instead. The comparisons to Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring were immediate.

It read as a rupture. It was actually a return. Two years later MR PORTER mapped the whole field, listing Styles alongside A$AP Rocky, Shawn Mendes, Billy Porter, Jaden Smith and Pharrell Williams, and placing them in a line that runs back through eighteenth century maharajas and sixteenth century English kings. Back, in other words, to a man on a scaffold in 1649 wearing a pearl in one ear.

The pearl was never feminine. It was made feminine, quite recently, and it is currently in the process of forgetting that.

What Nine Moments Add Up To

A queen used pearls to make an argument about her own body. A king died in one. A Japanese shopkeeper made them available to everybody. Chanel made the fake ones respectable, and two of the most photographed necklaces of the century turned out to be paste. A pearl multiplied its price three hundred times by being loved in public. And a black dress with a pearl choker changed the meaning of the object in a single night.

What none of them is about is grading, lustre or nacre thickness. If you want to be strict about it, the material barely appears in this story. What appears is intention, which is the only thing that has ever made jewellery interesting, and the reason the Diana Pearl Earrings or a single strand like the Elizabeth Pearls Necklace mean whatever the woman wearing them decides they mean.

If you want the contemporary end of the story, we wrote it separately in are pearls in style, and the styling itself is in the modern way to wear pearls. The irregular shapes that dominate this moment have their own chapter in what are baroque pearls, and the pieces themselves live at the pearl collection.