Winter 2023

akelite jewelry first cast its spell on me when I was eight years old. Each summer, my mom would send my sister and me via train to experience life in the city with our bachelorette aunts and our grandma. For my aunties, it was actually to see if they wanted kids one day, but for two little country farm girls, it was a glamorous moment in time. My aunties' and grandma’s city flat was a magical maze of rooms with high ceilings and bay windows and sliding pocket doors. Those summer visits expanded my world by awak- ening to the smell of baked scones and omelettes, while gazing out a window at my grandmother’s rooftop garden. It was evenings of pinochle card games, painting dried pumpkin seeds with red nail polish to be strung as a bracelet, jazzy music and dinners of pasta and sourdough bread. But, the best part of all this was their walk-through closets. Their huge closets housed their city clothes, hats and bins of sparkly jewelry.We loved playing a game where we would take turns in selecting one of the hats or jewels that would be ours for the week to wear and play dress-up. My sister was always attracted to the beret hats and big jeweled brooches, but my eyes were drawn to the chunky bracelets and dangling fruit pins that looked like candy. Little did I know that years later I would be scouring the internet in search of these rarities called Bakelite. Although those pieces of jewelry have long since been retired from my aunties’ closets, they’ve lived on in my memory, resting in that special place reserved for childhood summers spent in closets filled with treasures. I was recently reintroduced to Bakelite jewelry while browsing through an antique shop. There, locked in a display case, were the chunky brooches and bangles that I loved at first sight when I was eight years old. My passion returned. I went home and started trolling for them online like a borderline lunatic. What started out as mass-pro- duced plastic jewelry, Bakelite became seriously recognized as a material when it was worn by promi- nent designers such as Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, and was often featured in the pages of Vogue. Pieces by such designers weren’t cheap, although they were among the first examples of “costume jewelry.” However, the use of “cheap” materials by great designers gave plastics a respectability that caused a buzz for everyone to want them. Bakelite jewelry was most popular during the Art Deco period starting in the 1920s, but lasted through the 1940s. It was invented in the early 1900s by Dr. Leo Baekeland of NewYork and his team of chemists. It is a thermosetting resin which, once molded, retains its shape—an enormous advantage in mass production. While the earlier pieces are in muted colors and without carving, jewelry made from phenol resins became extremely desirable in the 1930s.These phenol resins were an 90 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 3 COLLECTING T E XT AND PHOTOGRA PHY B Y MAR J OR I E S OW The Stylish Nonchalance of Bakelite Jewelry B The green Bakelite brooch is an example of original Bakelite with added layers. Collector’s favorites are the dangling cherries and the rare bowling ball pin, while the butterscotch brooch shows off its exquisite carving.