From Gemstones to Jewellery 57
and kept away from the female body, condemned to sit in a safe. In
short, fashion—need I say more?—no longer speaks of the gemstone
but only of jewellery.
now fashion, as we know, is a language: through it, through the
system of signs it sets up, no matter how fragile this may seem,
our society—and not just that of women—exhibits, communicates
its being, says what it thinks of the world; so, just as the gemstone
basically expressed the essentially theological nature of ancient society,
so jewellery today, as seen in shops and in fashion magazines, merely
follows, expresses and signifies our times—having originated in the
ancestral world of the damned, the piece of jewellery has in one word
become secularized.
First and foremost this secularization has visibly affected the very
substance of jewellery; it is no longer made from just stone or metal,
but also fragile or soft materials such as glass or wood. Furthermore,
jewellery is no longer routinely given the job of showing off a prize that
is, so to speak, inhuman: you see jewellery made of common metal,
of inexpensive glass; and when jewellery imitates some precious
substance, gold or pearls, it is shameless; the copy, now a characteristic
of capitalist civilization, is no longer a hypocritical way of being rich on
the cheap—it is quite open about itself, makes no attempt to deceive,
only retaining the aesthetic qualities of the material it is imitating. In
short, there has been a widespread liberation of jewellery; its definition
is widening, it is now an object that is free, if one can say this, from
prejudice: multiform, multi-substance, to be used in an infinite variety
of ways, it is now no longer subservient to the law of the highest price
nor to that of being used in only one way, such as for a party or sacred
occasion: jewellery has become democratic.
of course, this democratization does not escape from new ways of
conferring value. as long as wealth regulated the rarity of a gemstone,
the latter could be judged by nothing but its price (that of its substance
and of the work put into it); but once just about anyone could procure
whatever they wanted, as soon as the work of art became a product,
there had to be a way, in our democratic, but still differentiated, societies,
of subjecting jewellery to another form of discrimination: and this is
taste, of which fashion is precisely the judge and the keeper. So today
we have jewellery of bad taste; and, rather paradoxically, what defines
bad taste in a piece of jewellery is curiously that which was once the