Vintage Opera Length Pearl Necklace With White Gold Clasp, ca. 1970

Mainly due to Coco Chanel's fashion influence, it became socially acceptable to wear long pearl necklaces in opera or even robe length even during the day from the 1930s onwards. But from a jewellery history perspective, another key figure was involved in this previously unthinkable fashion: Japanese Kokichi Mikimoto, who in the 1920s had developed a business-ready process to produce full-round cultured pearls. Previously, it had often taken years of collecting to come up with a necklace of natural pearls of the right size and colour. So this pearl necklace owes its existence equally to Coco Chanel and Kokichi Mikimoto. It has the impressive length of 84 cm, which is the so-called opera length: it is hard to imagine how long a lady would have had to wait for the completion of such a necklace in the years around 1900! A total of 147 pearls of creamy white colour are knotted together. Alternately, one larger and one smaller pearl are used in each case, so that the chain falls very mobile and gets a beautiful lightness - such a design, as Coco Chanel also wears in many photographs. At the neck, the pearl necklace is held by a modernist clasp made of textured white gold, so it can be worn with updos. Five blue sapphires form an abstract flower on the clasp. The clasp, but also the length let us date the necklace to the years around 1970, when especially long necklaces and also the style of the 1930s experienced a renaissance again.

Estimate:$1,100.49

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