Suddenly our mothers’ clip-ons are cool again
ALEXANDRA SHULMAN loves the look of multiple earrings, but not the pain of piercing. Now, she’s found an elegant solution...
FINALLY the earring pendulum has swung back towards clip-ons. It has been a long time coming — around 40 years. Glamorous versions are on offer from all the fashion houses this summer: Gucci, Dior, Oscar de la Renta and one of the Duchess of Cambridge’s favourite designers, Alessandra Rich.
For years the pendulum couldn’t really have moved much further in the direction of piercings.
With every inch of helix, lobule, anti-helix and concha — yes, these are all real names for parts of your ear — fre-quently pierced to accommodate a vast arrangement of studs and hoops, there’s not much space left. And that’s just among the fifty-somethings. (no wonder their daughters are now pierc-ing their septums and tongues.)
My friend Fiona returned from a trip to new York about 15 years ago, just at the very start of the trend, with a line of new studs running the length of her left ear. She’s since expanded along both ears with more studs, stars and diamonds. I have been wildly jealous of them ever since.
However, almost immediately others followed and I felt it was already too late to join in — I always feel it’s a bit tragic playing catch-up with trends.
TO BE honest it wasn’t only not wishing to jump on the bandwagon that held me back, but the recalled trauma of having my ears pierced, even all these years later. The weeks of pain-ful lobes and twisting the thin little ‘sleepers’ round and round to keep the holes open. The nasty dried blood encrusted round them in the morning.
I knew it was worth it — no teenager worth her Biba nail polish in the 1970s kept her ears unpierced — but the experience wasn’t exactly fun.
So as a result I stuck with the pair of common-or-garden single holes I had done when I was about 14.
And now? Well, the most fabulous ear accessory news is the rise of the ear cuff clip-on, which combines the best of every world, and of which I am a total devotee.
Wedged or clipped onto the lobe, you can dress your ear with as many as you wish without the piercing-parlour gun.
You can get all the style of those multi piercings without a single jab, just clipping them on and off. I have a cartilage band that sits over the top of my ear and a more discreet brass-and-fake-crystal ring, which I wear along with my basic pierced studs.
In the course of ‘research’ for this piece, I’ve bought another serpent cuff from Scream Pretty (£30, atterley.com) where there is a large range of inexpensive ear cuffs. There’s quite a lot to be said for not spending a fortune on them since, like any clip-ons, they have the unfortunate tendency to get lost. But if I were to splash out, then the gold, diamond and neon green enamel Yvonne Leon band would be my ideal holiday acces-sory (£300, net-a-porter.com).
Once you get into the clip-on frame of mind, there are fantastic vintage buys out there as they’ve been out of favour for so long.
Many street markets are treasure troves for second-hand clip-on jewellery or try Merola (merola. co.uk) for some of the most delicious vintage styles around, often at very reasonable prices.
Also check out designs by the late Kenneth Jay Lane, for dec-ades the godfather of costume jewellery, whose company still makes versions that tingle all our nostalgic Jackie O memories (kennethjaylane.com).
Very few of my mother’s genera-tion had or approved of pierced ears. But what gorgeous collections of clip-on earrings many possessed, utterly unappre-ciated by us. Large gold hoops for holidays; sculptural creations of Perspex and plastics to go with the Pucci-style prints of the 1960s; clusters of richly coloured glass to mimic fabulous jewels.
My own mother, writer Drusilla Beyfus, features in a heavenly black-and-white photograph taken for a magazine in 1956 by Eve Arnold. She’s posed on a ter-race accompanied by an anony-mous man, looking out over the darkening Manhattan skyline, wearing a satin duster coat and pearls, but it is her fabulous glit-tering clip-on earring that stands out in the gloaming.
When I left Vogue I was allowed to pick a copy print from the mag-azine’s archive. I chose a 1943 Carl Erickson illustration of a woman, her hair upswept, her neck circled in pearls, drawn while clipping on an earring for the evening ahead.
We can’t see the earring — it could be a diamond drop, or a shell-like pearl or any number of things — but what we know is she’s a woman of great style and is most definitely wearing clip-ons.
HOW many of us remember seeing women remove an earring to answer the telephone, receiver wedged in the crick of their neck to achieve the manoeuvre? How familiar was the sight of earrings placed in a trin-ket bowl or on the bedside table for the night (because it’s nearly impossible to sleep comfortably in clip-ons)?
I do, although I was of the gen-eration that wore dangly ethnic stones on University demos, and, in a nod to punk, safety-pin styles — though not the real thing.
Also in the 1980s there was a ren-aissance of show-stopping clip-ons such as Monty Don’s huge crystal baubles that dangled from a bow (yes, he ran a jewellery design firm before he was a gar-dener). Because, when it comes to huge, clip-ons always win the toss. (Often heavy, large earrings demand long spikes, if they are to carry the weight on pierced ears, which dig in behind the ear.)
They are also more flattering on the ears, which as we age seem to grow longer and look better with jewellery worn close on the lobe rather than anything that dangles. Another reason why, at 64, I’m hooked.