15 Chunky 70s & 80s Jewelry Brands Boomers Inherited — Secretly Worth A Fortune.

1979. You are standing at the hall mirror with your coat already on, clipping on a pair of earrings the size of a silver dollar. Gold tone. Heavy. They pull on your earlobes a little, and you don't care one bit, because that is the look. You wore them to the office, to the Christmas party, to your sister's wedding, and to a hundred ordinary Tuesdays. Then the style went out of fashion overnight, and those earrings went into a drawer. They have been sitting there ever since. That drawer is not a graveyard. The market for this jewellery has quietly woken back up, and the people buying it are not sentimental. So today we are going through 15 names that turned up on the backs of that jewellery. Most, I promise, you have not heard of. And let me tell you what is not on this list. Chanel is not here. Kenneth J. Lane is not here. Every video on this subject ends with those two, and if you own a signed Chanel cuff, you already know what you have. I would rather spend our time on the names still slipping through estate sales at three dollars apiece. I also want to hand you a different habit than the one everybody preaches. You have heard it a hundred times. Turn it over and read the name. That is the easy step. But this era gives you something better, and almost nobody teaches it. This is the first generation of costume jewellery you can actually date. Not guess at. Date. Some houses stamp the year straight into the metal. One changed its logo in a year. We can pin down exactly. A piece can tell you when it was born, and when you know when. You know an enormous amount about what. Date it before you name it. That is the whole video in five words. And the awkward part. There is no money in teaching you this. The mall jeweller earns his living selling you something new. Nobody can patent a date stamp, or put it in a gift box and sell it to you fresh next Christmas. So the knowledge drifts. It stays with the dealers buying at your estate sale, and it almost never reaches the woman doing the sorting. Let's begin. Number 15. Monet. I start here because Monet sits in more American houses than any other name on this list, and because the story attached to it gets repeated constantly and happens to be backwards. The Chernow brothers started in Providence, Rhode Island, in the late 20s. By 1937 the company was Monet. Its calling card was plating. Triple plating. Layer over layer. Done so well that it is common to pick up a Monet piece from 50 years ago and find the gold tone still bright. That is not luck. That is a decision that cost money. Now the correction. You will hear that Monet's design direction was shaped by a young Liz Claiborne, years before she was famous. That is the story running backwards. Liz Claiborne Inc. bought Monet in the year 2000. She did not design for them as an unknown. The man who actually set the house style was Edmond Granville, who came out of Cartier and joined Monet in the 1940s. Which changes what you hunt for. Not a Claiborne-era piece. The thick, sculptural, unapologetically bold work of the now among Monet's most collectible output. And no one more line. In 1977 Monet launched a genuine fine jewellery line called Siani in 14 carat gold, sterling and vermeil. If a piece says Siani, you are not holding costume jewellery at all. Number 14. Swarovski. Everybody knows this name. So why is it on a hidden treasure list? Because of a dating trick almost nobody uses. And it may be the most useful thing I teach you tonight. Most people think the swan has always been the Swarovski mark. It has not. For nearly 90 years the symbol was an edelweiss. The little alpine flower. And I have watched people look right at one and call it a snowflake. Swarovski's own guidance is plain. From 1989 onward, genuine pieces carry the swan. So a swan on the back means 1989 or later. And the little flower means older. 30 seconds and you have bracketed the age. There is a third mark that confuses everyone. The letters S dot A dot L. That is Swarovski America Limited. And it turns up on American market pieces from roughly the late 70s through 1988. It looks like a random stamp. It is a date range sitting right there in the metal. What to hunt? The figural brooches. Lizards, bumblebees and especially the Christmas tree pins. Some issued with the year on them. Plain crystal is modest money. But marked figurals with every stone still present hold real value. And they land in donation bins constantly. Because the swan is small and nobody thinks to look. Number 13. Napier. Napier is the one nearly every American family has. And I want to be more honest about it than most people will be. The company traces back into the 1800s in Meriden, Connecticut. And it was never a junkmaker. By the 70s it had swung hard into big sculptural statement pieces. Heavy enameled links. Thick geometric collars. A whole menagerie of animal brooches in bright poured enamel over gold tone. Now the honest part. Most Napier from this era is worth modest money. Ten dollars. Twenty. Thirty. Big tangled lots go for very little. If somebody tells you every signed Napier is a windfall, they are selling you excitement, not information. But the market for Napier is not flat. It is lumpy. The heavy figural animals, the articulated pieces that actually move, and complete matching sets climb well past the common stuff. Because they were worn hard and thrown out casually. And check one more thing. Napier made a great deal of sterling. Pick the piece up. And if it has that dense, surprising weight, look for the word sterling. Because that single stamp changes the arithmetic entirely. Number 12. Sinner. A name most Americans have never said out loud. Attached to the most remarkable little company in this whole story. Emmanuel Sinner came to America in 1886 and opened his own firm in lower Manhattan in 1892. For 40 years he made the real thing. Gold. Platinum. Diamonds. Then the depression destroyed the market for fine jewelry. And Sinner did what almost nobody dared. Instead of closing, he moved his entire fine jewelry operation over to costume jewelry and refused to lower the standards. Same benches. Same hands. He worked until he was 92. In 1978, his granddaughter Patricia Sinner Hill took over with her husband David. And by the 100th anniversary in 1992, the company was doing millions a year, still handmade in New York City. What you are looking for is what boomer women wore to work. Heavy gilt collars, chunky link bracelets, glass cabochons the size of a thumbnail, faux pearls, animal motifs. Queen Sophia of Spain wore Sinner. And here is the tip professionals use. The overwhelming majority of genuine Sinner is signed. So if you find something that looks exactly like Sinner and carries no mark at all, it is most likely what dealers call a period copy. With most makers, unsigned might mean hidden treasure. With this of my favorite stories in American costume jewelry. And it starts in the back of a taxi. In 1976, a young woman named Wendy Gell was driving a cab in New York City, trying to think of a birthday present for a friend. What she came up with was a wide, encrusted, gloriously overloaded cuff bracelet, glittering with rhinestones and little found objects. And That one idea built her a career. Through the 80s, her work landed on magazine covers, and on the arms of some of the most photographed people in the country. Look for her name signed on the back, usually with a year, sometimes with a little heart. And note this. Because the work is so encrusted, condition matters enormously, and missing stones knock the value down fast. Wendy Gell is still with us, still working. And these days she teaches jewelry making at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University, to students ranging from teenagers to women in their 80s. The woman who invented the wristy is teaching your generation how to make one. Number 10. Alexis Kirk. If Wendy Gell was the joy of the 80s, Alexis Kirk was the drama of the 70s. And his pieces get mistaken for museum reproductions. Kirk was born in Los Angeles in 1936. His grandfather worked as a jeweler with Lalique in France. His father was an artist at Disney Studios. Kirk studied art at Harvard, went on to the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1970 won the Coty American Fashion Critics Award, about the highest honor American fashion handed out. What he made was enormous. Articulated gilt breastplates, hammered cuffs with ram's heads, belt buckles the size of your palm. And here is the detail I love. Kirk was, by all accounts, a lifelong registered Democrat. His elephant motif designs, of all things, were worn through the 80s by Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush. Cher wore his work. So did the Duchess of Windsor. Look for the signature Alexis Kirk, usually on a small plaque or the reverse of a link. But know the practical part too. A great many of his pieces went out unsigned. So learn the look. Huge scale, heavy gilt metal, ancient world motifs, and a build quality that feels far too serious for the price tag it is wearing at the flea market. Number nine. Lawrence V.R.B. A living American designer whose name I would like every one of you to memorize tonight, because his pieces are out there, mispriced, all over this country. Larry Verber came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and moved to New York in the with no connections and no job. He wanted to work at Miriam Haskell so badly that he simply kept showing up at their offices until somebody hired him. They started him as a counter. Counting. Within a couple of months, he was designing on Fridays. He went to Castlecliff, where he built a Mayan-inspired collection, dreamed up after visiting the American Museum of Natural History, then returned to Haskell as head designer through the 70s. His Egyptian collection from the mid-70s got picked up by the national press and remains some of the most collectible material that company ever produced. In 1983, he went out under his own name, and the pieces got enormous, four inches and bigger. Jeweled sculptures is the phrase people use, and it fits. Everyone is made by hand in the United States, never mass-produced. Look for Lawrence V.R.B. or L.V.R.B., and here is Because the pieces are so big and theatrical, people assume they must be modern costume shop junk. They are the opposite. They are studio work by a named American artist still at his bench. If you were an American woman in the 70s, there is a real chance there is a squash blossom necklace or a heavy turquoise cuff in your house right now, and it is the most misunderstood thing in the box. Navajo and Zuni silversmiths learned metalworking from Mexican smiths in the mid-1800s, and turquoise entered the silver work around 1880. Then the 70s brought an enormous national craze for Southwest jewelry, which is exactly why so many of you have one. Here is the knowledge that matters most, and it is beautifully specific to our decade. Individual artist hallmarks, the silversmith's own personal stamp, only came into widespread use in the 1970s, which means if your piece carries a maker's mark, initials, a symbol, a family stamp, you are almost certainly holding something from that era or later, made by a specific, identifiable person who can often be researched by name. Turn it over. Look for the artist's mark and for the word sterling or 925. Look at the stone. Natural turquoise usually shows a matrix, those vein-like markings, and varies in color across the piece. Stabilized turquoise is not fake and is not a scandal, but it should never be sold as natural. Now the legal note, and please hear this one properly. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 is a truth in advertising law. If you ever sell a piece, you cannot describe it as Native American, or Navajo, or Zuni, unless you can actually support that. Watch for wording like Indian style, which usually signals an imitation made somewhere else entirely. If you are unsure what you have, say what you know and no more, and get a specialist to look at it. Alright, take a breath with me. Seven names to go, and two things first. The honest one. I am not a certified appraiser, and nothing in this video is a professional appraisal, or insurance, or legal advice. Every figure I mention is a reported market or auction range, and condition, rarity, and demand move those numbers enormously. Before you buy, sell, or insure anything you believe is valuable, please check with a certified appraiser and with your own state and local regulations, and have the piece looked at in person by a qualified independent professional with the thing actually in her hand, and the small one. If you are still with me, tap subscribe, because the last seven names are where the real money in this era lives, and number three is a man whose work is in your jewelry box even if his name is not on it. Back to it. Number seven. Robert Lee Morris. This is the name to know if the piece in your hand is heavy, matte gold, and shaped like something organic. A river stone, a bone, a shield. Robert Lee Morris does not call himself a jewelry designer. He calls himself a metalsmith, an artist who happens to make jewelry, and the record supports him. He was discovered in 1971 by the who showed his work at a Plaza Hotel outpost called Sculpture to Wear. In 1976, one of his collars landed on the cover of Vogue, and his work then appeared in 49 consecutive issues over seven years. He opened the Soho Gallery Artware in 1977, won the Coty Award in 81, and in 2007 became the first jewelry designer ever given the CFDA's Geoffrey Bean Lifetime Achievement Award. But for our purposes, the thing that matters is Donna Curran. Morris created something like 36 collections for her, which means his work sold through American department stores in serious volume. It is out there, in your drawers. Look for RLM, or the name spelled out, or a signature on a small tag. The style is unmistakable. Matte or brushed gold tone brass, soft organic shapes, nothing fussy, nothing sparkly. Recent market listings for his Donna Caranara pieces commonly run from a few hundred dollars into the low thousands for the important collars. People give them away constantly, because matte brass does not shout the way rhinestones do. Number six, Butler and Wilson, a British name most Americans have never heard, which is exactly what makes it the most reliably underpriced thing on this list. Enormous rhinestone brooches shaped like spiders, lizards, snakes, flamingos, and faces. Simon Wilson's own line was that, from the very beginning, they never did subtle. It began in 1969, when two young antique dealers, Mickey Butler and Simon Wilson, set up a stall at the Antiquarius Market on the Kings Road in Chelsea. In 1972, they opened their own shop on the Fulham Road and started making their own designs, beginning with an art deco collection. And here is the specific detail, far better than the vague version you usually get. Princess Diana was a regular customer at the Fulham Road shop. She wore a pair of their crescent moon earrings to a meeting with the Sultan of Oman. Jerry Hall wore their pieces. So did Catherine Deneuve, Faye Dunaway, and Iman. At the end of the 70s, the firm designed the Christmas lights for Regent Street in London. The mark is B&W, or the full name, usually on the reverse. The stones are prong-set Austrian crystal, not glued, and the metal has proper weight. Of everything on this list, this is the name I would most expect to find in an American junk case at $5, because the seller has genuinely never heard of it and cannot look up what he never noticed. Number 5. Christian Lacroix. And here I have to correct something repeated everywhere, because getting it wrong costs you money in both directions. You will hear that Lacroix opened his house in 1987, and that his jewelry is therefore the purest possible 80s material. The first half is broadly right, the second half is not. Christian Lacroix jewelry did not exist in the 70s, and barely existed in the 80s. The accessories line, including the costume jewelry, arrived in 1989. Collector reference records put the Lacroix jewelry marks at 1989 through 2009. So if you have a big, baroque, gilded Lacroix piece in that inherited box, it is almost certainly a 1990s object, not a boomer era one. Why bother correcting that? Because it tells you where to look. If you inherited from someone who was young in the 70s, Lacroix is not what you are hunting for. If you inherited from someone buying department store fashion in the early 90s, absolutely check for it. And if you ever sell one, describing it accurately protects your credibility on every other piece in the lot. It is worth checking, because the work is genuinely wonderful. Gilded metal, deep enamel, hearts and crosses and suns, baroque excess piled on without apology. It was dismissed as garish for 20 years, prices sat on the floor, and it has been climbing again as maximalism came back. Look for Christian Lacroix made in France, or Christian Lacroix bijoux. Number four, Givenchy. And now the single most concrete home test in this entire video. Hubert de Givenchy founded his couture house in Paris in 1952. Everybody knows him for dressing Audrey Hepburn. Far fewer people know that from the middle of the 70s, the house put out a serious, high quality costume jewelry line, sold under the marking Givenchy Paris, New York. Here is the gift. Pieces from roughly 1977 to 1981 were date stamped. The actual year stamped alongside the Givenchy name, usually on a small oval plaque on the reverse of a pendant, or on the back of an earring clip. Go get a lamp and your reading glasses and look right now, because that is not an estimate or an educated guess. That is the object telling you its own birth year. The quality tell is the plating. 70s and early 80s Givenchy used thick, generous gold plating that genuinely resists tarnish. Pick a piece up and it should feel solid, not tinny. And here is the market reality that makes this worth your time. Among the great French houses, Givenchy costume jewelry is still the affordable one. The execution stands beside the more famous names. The prices have not caught up. That gap is your opportunity and it will not stay open forever. Number three, Robert Goossens. Now the name that is almost certainly in your jewelry box, even though it is almost certainly not stamped on anything you own. Robert Goossens was born in Paris in 1927, the son of a metal foundry worker. He apprenticed as a jeweler and became the greatest costume jeweler of the 20th century that the public has never heard of. In the trade they called him Monsieur Bijoux, Mr. Jewel. Understand what he actually did. The great fashion houses did not, as a rule, make their own costume jewelry. They commissioned workshops. Goossens was the workshop. He made for Coco Chanel herself, for Balenciaga, for Madame Grey, for Dior. And in 1974, he began working for Yves Saint Laurent, alongside Lulu de la Falaise, who ran accessories there. By around 1980, according to the fashion historian Florence Muller, Goossens effectively controlled Saint Laurent's jewelry licenses. His workshop also supplied Givenchy, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix. One workshop, feeding pieces out under half a dozen of the most famous names of the era. He also produced a limited amount under his own name, marked Goossens Paris or R. Goossens Paris. And some designs carry a swirl worked into the piece standing for the G. He sold his business to Chanel in 2005 and died in 2016. So, the instruction is this. When you find a heavy gilt French piece, do not stop at the fashion house name. Look at the construction. Byzantine motifs, poured or pressed glass cabochons set in warm gilded bronze. Real hand finishing. That is a Goossens fingerprint. And it moves a piece from a costume item to a documented piece of couture history. Number two, Ugo Coriani. Same principle, different country. And this is the name I most enjoy telling people about, because the proof of it sits in a museum in New York. Ugo Coriani was born in Italy in 1935 and moved to Milan at 20. In 1973, he began making jewellery out of his own Milan atelier. And in 1976, he met a young designer named Gianni Versace. The two became lifelong collaborators. What followed reads like a list of the entire decade. Coriani made jewellery for Versace, for Valentino, for Chloé, for Fendi, for Christian Lacroix. And when Karl Lagerfeld presented his very first haute couture collection for Chanel in 1983, the opulent draped pearls in that show were Coriani's work. He and Versace also built costumes and jewellery for productions at La Scala in Milan, including Evita and Salome. And here is the institutional proof I promised. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds a Karl Lagerfeld jewellery set made by Coriani, a matching bracelet and brooch built from a rainbow of resin lipsticks. The Met's own description credits him by name and notes that inflating scale for pure drama was his particular strength, which is, if you think about it, the perfect one-line description of this entire era. Coriani died in 1992, leaving no heirs, and the workshop stopped. The supply is closed permanently, and it was never large. Look on the back for U.C. Ugo Coriani, or U. Coriani made in Italy, often on a small cartouche or on the box clasp. Resin, enamel, Venetian masks, shells, coral forms, dramatic collars in black and gold. If you find that signature, you are holding the hand behind Versace and behind Lagerfeld's Chanel debut, and there is very little of it left in the world. Number one, Yves Saint Laurent. And I am putting Saint Laurent at number one for a reason that has nothing to do with the logo. YSL costume jewelry from the 70s and 80s is the most likely, genuinely valuable thing in an ordinary American jewelry box from this era. Not because it is rare, it's sold widely, but because it was made properly in France by the ateliers we have just been discussing. Heavy gold tone clip earrings, sculptural cuffs, arty sunbursts and sunflowers, faceted crystals in colors that have no business working together and absolutely do. Now let me be straight with you about the money, because there is a number circulating and I could not verify it. You will hear that a single pair of YSL clip earrings sold at auction for $2,772. I could not trace that to a source, and I am not going to repeat a figure I cannot stand behind. Here is what the visible market actually shows. Vintage YSL clip earrings on the major dealer platforms commonly run from around $150 at the low end to nearly $4,000 at the top, with a typical piece landing somewhere in the $700s. Hold on to that, because it is a better story than the fake one. A pair of old clip-on earrings, the exact style thrown into the giveaway bag first because clips read as old-fashioned, routinely carrying several hundred dollars. That is real, it is checkable, and it happens every week. And here is how you find the top of that range. Look for the workshop. Pieces made by Robert Goossens for Saint Laurent and pieces using Maison Grispois poured glass sit in a completely different tier from the ordinary logo pieces. The signature is simply YSL, or Yves Saint Laurent, usually with Made in France, and the clip itself is evidence. A heavy, well-machined clip-back with a proper hinge is a 70s or 80s tell. The very thing that makes people dismiss the piece is the thing that dates it to the decade collectors are hunting hardest. So let me pull it together, honestly, the way this channel always does. Not every chunky piece from these decades is a fortune. Most of it is not. Condition rules everything. Missing stones and worn plating cut value fast, and a common design from a great name may only ever be modest money. Signatures on the valuable names do get faked, and the market moves. So please do not take a number from a screen, from me or anyone else, as the value of the thing in your hand. Have it looked at in person by a qualified independent appraiser, and check with a certified appraiser and your own state and local rules before you buy, sell, or insure anything. But the arithmetic of checking is unchanged. Looking costs you a lamp and 10 minutes. Selling a signed Butler and Wilson brooch for a dollar at a driveway sale, because nobody ever taught you the name, costs you everything the piece was worth. So here is your homework tonight, and it is not the usual homework. Do not just read the names. Date the pieces. Look for a year stamped on a Givenchy plaque. Look for a swan or a little alpine flower on Swarovski. Look for a silversmith's hallmark on the turquoise. Look for a heavy machined clipback rather than a modern post. The era is the evidence. And now I want to argue with you. I think this industry has trained us to worship the fashion house label on the front and ignore the workshop that actually built the piece. I think a documented Goossens or Coriani construction tells you more than the famous name stamped beside it. Serious collectors will tell me I have that exactly backwards. That the house name is the market and everything else is romance. Tell me where you land. I genuinely want to know. And then go get the box. And tell me down in the comments which of these 15 names you found and what the piece is. If there is a date stamped on it, give me the year. If there is a mark you cannot identify at all, describe it as carefully as you can. And let this comment section do what it does. Because there are people down there who know things I do not. Somebody watching tonight has a signed piece in a drawer they were three days away from donating. Don't let that be you. Don't sell. Don't donate. Don't scrap a single thing from these decades until you have turned it over, read it and dated it. I'll see you in the next one.