Vintage Indian Jewelry: Now and Then
Tuesday, August 3, 2010 at 2:08PM by Jewelry Jealousy ;)
The New York Times style section recently highlighted a new line that will be selling at select Club Monaco stores, called the Vintage Indian Jewelry collection. These pieces were acquired from manufacturers in India. Each piece was made differently, some with more aged material, and all worth a look. Raga is one designer who made pieces with similar appeal.
In recent fashion history, Indian style hit the Americas big in the 80s; costume jewelry from the runways (and to the street) saw women accessorized in the Indian style. Raga designed jewelry by fusing different traditional cultures with the modern world. Raga purposefully made costume jewelry for American women.
Raga used traditional Indian handcrafting techniques and materials to create jewelry for the American market. They designed pieces that integrated the essence of Indian design, including pieces with natural materials like wood and shell, chunkier beads and geometric shapes, dark metals, and overall essence of traditional Indian jewelry: a hybrid was born. For example, bangles (which actually originated in India several thousand years ago) were treated to a funky spin by Raga, who widened the size and molded the shape into geometric "80's" shapes.
Raga used lots of darkly metallic shades like brass instead of garish bright metals, and wood and bone-like material instead of obvious plastics They substituted opaque neon beads so popular for the American mall girl with bold transluscent beads of India, but fattened them up to keep to the chunky beading trends.
Given the current surge of Bollywood movie appreciation in the U.S. and the chunky jewelry trend revival of the past year, Raga and similar Indian vintage costume jewelry is a hip throwback as well as a contemporary fashion “do.”
For more vintage Indian jewelry, visit www.RaefieldDesigns.com.
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