It was a radio interview followed by a meandering thought process that started me deliberating on today’s fixation with recycled gold.
Invited onto BBC Radio, on a regular afternoon slot interviewing people with unusual careers, I was explaining how I came to be a jewellery historian; how, as a painfully shy teenager I walked into one of London’s indoor antiques markets and asked for a holiday job. It so happened that jewellery dealers needed someone to man a tiny stall while they took over a bigger one.
So it all started, and instead of going to university I stayed in the market for some three years, giving myself a very different, and as I see it now an absolutely unique and unrepeatable education. Colleagues became friends, or more like a second family, welcoming me with open arms, and hearts. To walk into the shabby, dusty Barrett Street Antique Supermarket ( which later morphed into the more presentable Grays), with its jumble of treasures, its old curiosity-shop-style booths, its eccentric stallholders, was to enter an alternate universe; to me, it seemed like a new world of wonders.
Every day was a school day. Every day dealers and ‘runners’ came round with briefcases, old plastic carrier bags or pockets full of jewels and gems. Often they were characters well-known in the trade with impassioned specialisms such as mourning jewellery (Harry ‘Death’ – rumour had it he slept in a coffin), Georgian paste, (the late great Mr Lewis) or cameos (Richard Digby) and every day they all generously shared their knowledge with me. I learnt from them all, and from handling and examining antique jewellery, all day every day, especially as every morning, I spent time setting out the jewels in the showcase in my little cubby-hole booth.
One of the things I came to understand was how gold, and indeed all jewellery had been recycled, remodelled, re-set, passed down through generations. Gathering its legend and guarding its secrets on the way, Eternity is in the DNA of a jewel or gem. Whenever I hear about recycled, upcycled or even worse ‘pre-loved’ jewellery, I remember that jewellery is and has always been the earliest, original and ultimate recycled luxury.
I remember too someone telling me all those years ago that gold had always been melted down and re-used and that maybe even the Victorian gold brooch or bangle I was handling at the time could have been made from gold that was around in ancient Egypt. I was enthralled; I was touching history, and at the time it was a deeply romantic notion rather than an environmental issue.
It’s also an age-old practical consideration, as the minuscule shavings, dust and filings falling from workshop benches into leather ‘skins’ or trays and even onto carpets and floorboards, are routinely saved, recycled and refined. And anyone can take an unloved, unworn gold jewel into a merchant or refiner to be melted down in exchange for ready cash.
Gold has always been a store of wealth as well as a sign of the divine, with the power of the sun, the lifeforce. Gold uniquely combines hard and soft values. So there’s nothing new about recycled gold, even if it’s become a trendy buzz phrase in today’s circularity-conscious climate.
It reminds me slightly of the time, in the late 90s or noughties when suddenly ‘vintage’ was all the rage, when it seemed the rest of the world had woken up to the joys of antique jewellery that I knew and loved. Or when jewellery clients became collectors and gravitated from Bond Street to Belperron.
Also, I can’t quite see how recycled gold, worthy as it seems, satisfies the urgent quest for traceability and transparency, trust and truth, all especially needed and sought after in our privileged luxury world. Because there’s no way, as far as I understand, to trace the origins of recycled gold, to ensure it hasn’t entered the supply chain through nefarious means or from an unethical, unsustainable source, especially if it’s been recycled for aeons.
It’s origins that matter today – olive oil, coffee, chocolate, single estate, terroir, Muzo, Mahenge, and now, more and more we know where our diamonds come from, Argyle, Lukara, Diavik, Petra. So surely it’s glorious gold’s turn to show and tell, as the impressive SMO initiative has started to do, tracing gold fully from source, and a source that does good, gold that’s just starting to build its own legend for the ages, to be conjured into heirlooms of the future, with a new story. Hopefully not too many secrets. Good as gold.
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Cover image: Skall x Kinraden Levitas fine jewellery collection
