Regardless if jewellery is your factor, there’s a piece of decoration each individual is aware of: the engagement ring. It spawns obsessive deep dives on social media, is entrenched in tradition, present in movies, and is the focus of multimillion-dollar promoting campaigns — “A diamond Is Without end” amongst them. However does anybody really know the why?
Marion Fasel, jewellery knowledgeable and founding father of on-line effective jewellery journal The Adventurine, now has written a ebook, “The Historical past of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance,” that unpacks the — longer than one may suppose — historical past of the cherished piece.
Offered by Solely Pure Diamonds — which supported the manufacturing course of, because it did with Assouline’s “Diamonds: Diamond Tales” — the limited-edition, hardcover, small-format ebook lushly and meticulously takes readers on a journey by way of the historical past of the engagement ring, establishing the story by way of diamond cuts reaching again to the fifteenth century.
“I’ve at all times been fascinated by bridal as a result of engagement rings, it’s the one factor that nearly everybody can establish with when speaking about effective jewellery,” stated Fasel, who spent years at InStyle journal, serving to to set the bar for style magazines’ effective jewellery protection. “Once I moved on-line with The Adventurine, the numbers of folks that have been all in favour of engagement ring tales have been at all times so excessive. It outnumbers anything.”
Whereas there may be full consideration on the subject, few perceive the historical past. Fasel candidly stated that she, too, wasn’t precisely certain concerning the story and she or he wasn’t alone. “Once I went to my go-to specialists in historical past and requested, ‘Are you aware the historical past of diamond engagement rings?” It was “no.”
Creator and jewellery knowledgeable Marion Fasel.
Andrew Werner
Creating the tome led her on a nine-month odyssey by way of her pc, exploring the archives of the world’s celebrated cultural establishments, from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Vatican. The primary individual she spoke to, gem vendor Benjamin Zucker, turned her information within the course of, she stated. Zucker kicked issues off within the ebook’s foreword writing about seeing and amassing pointed diamonds from the fifteenth century and earlier — a degree that helped Fasel to unlock a fantasy that engagement rings are an invention of the Twentieth century. “There’s false impression that it was a distinct segment observe till 1947, when De Beers promoted it in an promoting marketing campaign with the tagline ‘A Diamond Is Without end,’” she writes within the ebook’s introduction.
She begins within the fifteenth century with the primary solitaires, remarking that the true starting isn’t recognized, debunking one other false impression that there was an precise “first” diamond engagement ring in 1477 when Archduke Maximilian I of Austria gave Mary of Burgundy a diamond ring. “That’s not true,” Fasel stated level clean. “It’s everywhere in the web and it’s jumped into some books. However there’s a doc within the Vatican that has a marriage that predates that by about three years, which is within the ebook.”
Utilizing vibrant imagery — from the Renaissance to Grace Kelly to Beyoncé — she charts the jewel’s lineage. There’s a Renaissance design with the Latin inscription “I’m a token of affection,” a 1920 Tiffany setting and an early Asscher minimize in an ornate platinum ring made round 1915, a mid-Twentieth century emerald-cut diamond ring, and a recent cushion-cut diamond and gold ring — every including a brand new layer to the story.
Whereas historic, the true driver of the ebook is her model guides, which spotlight the vocabulary of diamonds, diagramming the elements of rings. “I believed you must see these drawings alongside the rings as a result of I really feel that chronology is sort of unimaginable to do in any jewellery historical past interval, since you’re by no means going to have the ability to fill in all the pieces,” she defined.
Throughout the pages there may be “a continuing connection and dialog” between the engagement rings of the previous and the current “which, in fact, I didn’t know was going to occur,” she stated. An instance: a picture of Gloria Swanson behind lace in a 1924 Edward Steichen {photograph} carrying her giant oval diamond engagement, an iconic picture of the Artwork Deco interval.
It’s a web page after a photograph of Woman Gaga on the 2024 Venice Worldwide Movie Competition carrying an oval diamond engagement ring and black lace Philip Treacy headpiece. “I confirmed that to a couple folks, they usually have been like, ‘Oh, she should have recognized that. She should have deliberate it.’ I used to be like, look, everybody I’ve proven that Steichen image to says, ‘I by no means noticed the ring.’
“We speak about symbolism a lot in jewellery right now,” she continued. “It’s such a spotlight of developments. However what’s the strongest symbolic jewel within the historical past of the world? It’s a diamond engagement ring and it has been constantly worn for 500 years.”
The ebook debuts Monday on Amazon, naturaldiamonds.com and choose jewellery retailers throughout the U.S.
