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 point of interest of multimillion-dollar promoting campaigns — “A diamond Is Ceaselessly” amongst them. However does anybody actually know the why?
Marion Fasel, jewellery professional and founding father of on-line high quality jewellery journal The Adventurine, now has written a e book, “The Historical past of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance,” that unpacks the — longer than one would possibly assume — historical past of the cherished piece.
Introduced 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 e book lushly and meticulously takes readers on a journey by means of the historical past of the engagement ring, organising the story by means of diamond cuts reaching again to the fifteenth century.
“I’ve all the time been fascinated by bridal as a result of engagement rings, it’s the one factor that nearly everybody can establish with when speaking about high quality jewellery,” stated Fasel, who spent years at InStyle journal, serving to to set the bar for style magazines’ high quality jewellery protection. “Once I moved on-line with The Adventurine, the numbers of those that have been desirous about engagement ring tales have been all the time so excessive. It outnumbers the rest.”
Whereas there may be full consideration on the subject, few perceive the historical past. Fasel candidly stated that she, too, wasn’t precisely positive concerning the story and he or she 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.”
Writer and jewellery professional Marion Fasel.
Andrew Werner
Creating the tome led her on a nine-month odyssey by way of her laptop, 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 e book’s foreword writing about seeing and amassing pointed diamonds from the fifteenth century and earlier — some extent that helped Fasel to unlock a fable 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 Ceaselessly,’” she writes within the e book’s introduction.
She begins within the fifteenth century with the primary solitaires, remarking that the true starting isn’t identified, 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 e book.”
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 lower 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 actual driver of the e book is her model guides, which spotlight the vocabulary of diamonds, diagramming the components of rings. “I believed you could see these drawings alongside the rings as a result of I really feel that chronology is sort of inconceivable to do in any jewellery historical past interval, since you’re by no means going to have the ability to fill in every part,” she defined.
Throughout the pages there may be “a relentless 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 massive 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 Pageant carrying an oval diamond engagement ring and black lace Philip Treacy headpiece. “I confirmed that to some individuals, and so they have been like, ‘Oh, she will need to have identified that. She will need to 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 at present,” she continued. “It’s such a spotlight of tendencies. 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 e book debuts Monday on Amazon, naturaldiamonds.com and choose jewellery retailers throughout the U.S.