Fashion Jewelry Us
Q: I may be over-emphasizing the current meaning of
costume -- is there an older one -- but it seems to imply that at some
time in the past alal jewelry was good jewelry except that used in costumes for plays,
etc. Or maybe it was a convenient name to describe
it, or even a
euphemism for cheap jewelry. Anyone know?
A:Webster Collegiate dates "costume jewelry" to 1927. This did
not particularly surprise me, because I doubt that at an earlier time
the average woman would want to be associated with something with a
name which would remind people of actors and the theater (I have read
that Lizzie Borden, who was socially shunned though she had been found
not guilty of the murder of her parents, became friends with actors,
who were similarly shunned).
An older term was "paste." From *The Century Dictionary*:
3. Heavy glass made by fusing silica (quartz,
flint, or pure sand), potash, borax, and white
oxid of lead, etc., to imitate gems ; hence, a fac-
titious gem of this material. To this glass addition
may be made of antimony glass, or of oxids of manganese,
cobalt, copper, or chromium, the lead often being largely
in excess of a normal silicate. Also called _strass._
A Louis XVI. clock, the pendulum formed as a circle
of fine old _pastes._ _Hamilton Collection Catalogue._
4:. In mineral., the mineral substance in which
[...]
II. _a._ Made of paste, as an artificial jewel
(see I., 3) ; hence, artificial ; sham ; counterfeit ;
not genuine : as, _paste_ diamonds.
, the' fiction out may trick her,
And in _paste_ gems and frippery deck her;
Oh ! flickering, feeble, and unsicker
I've found her still. _Burns,_ On Life.
According to the AHD4 etymology of "strass," the word was named after
Joseph Strasser, an 18th-century German jeweler.
It looks like "costume jewelry" was a euphemism for "paste jewelry,"
because "paste" had gained negative connotations.
(It's always possible, I suppose, that "costume jewelry" gets the
"costume" from some other use of the word besides an actor's costume.)
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