Vintage Chanel Costume Jewelry

The first person to knock off Chanel jewelry may have been Coco Chanel, who made costume copies of her finer stuff by substituting gold for gold-plated metal, diamonds for paste, and glass for pearls, so that, as she put it, "women can wear fortunes that cost nothing." As with her clothing, which was of its time at the height of the Art Deco era without being particularly beholden to that era's geometric and machined style, Chanel's earliest costume jewelry could be lyrical and fanciful—how else to describe brooches in the shape of green tree frogs, their lead bodies colored with enamel, their webbed feet packed with paste, or airy pins supporting sprays of pâte de verre flowers. Products that were unique to the Chanel costume line included "poured" glass pieces manufactured for Chanel by Maison Gripoix, although colored glass also figured prominently in Chanel costume jewelry manufactured before and after World War II—Chanel closed her Paris business in 1939, and did not reopen it until 1954 when she was 71. So, while some of the vintage pins from the 1930s and 1950s were made of poured glass, others simply used colored glass stones that were cut and polished to fit their gilt-metal settings. As for the overall shapes of these pins, they ranged from abstract to floral, although one of Chanel's most famous motifs was the familiar Maltese Cross. By the 1960s, Chanel costume jewelry reflected the designer's enthusiasm for ancient art styles, from Byzantine necklaces to Anglo Saxon belt buckles. In a curious footnote to the legitimate vintage Chanel costume jewelry on the market, collectors should be aware of pieces from 1941 that are marked in script with the word "Chanel." In fact, these pieces were manufactured only during the spring of 1941 by the Chanel Novelty Co. of New York, which subsequently changed its name to Reinad Novelty Co. Which is not to say that these Chanel fakes are worthless—quite the opposite. Because they were only produced for a single season, the supply of these pieces, an example of which was a painted seahorse festooned with plastic pearls, was never vast. Rarer still are items marked with both names, Chanel and Reinad. Ironically, these fake Chanels are so scarce, they may be worth more than comparable, real Chanel pieces from the 1930s and '50s.