Jackie Kennedy’s FAKE PEARLS Sold for $211,500

In 1996, three strands of “pearls” once worn by Jacqueline Kennedy were offered at Sotheby’s in New York.

There was just one problem: they weren’t pearls. They were glass.

Sotheby’s estimated the necklace at only $500–$700. But when the bidding began, the price exploded. The necklace eventually sold for $211,500 — more than 300 times its top estimate.

The buyer was Lynda Resnick, who bid on behalf of the Franklin Mint with her husband, Stewart Resnick. Newspapers mocked the extraordinary price. Why would anyone pay $211,500 for fake pearls?

Years later, Lynda Resnick had a very different answer.

She called the purchase a “phenomenal bargain.”

And she had the numbers to prove it.

The Franklin Mint used Jackie Kennedy’s original necklace to create more than 130,000 reproductions, selling them for around $200 each. By Resnick’s own figures, that represented roughly $26 million in gross sales.

But the story begins long before the auction.

These were the pearls associated with Jackie Kennedy, one of the most photographed women of the 20th century. In a famous 1962 photograph by Cecil Stoughton, young John F. Kennedy Jr. reaches for the pearls around his mother’s neck.

Other photographs captured Jackie wearing similar strands during the Kennedy years, while Jacques Lowe photographed the Kennedy family at Hyannis Port.

And in the Sotheby’s catalogue, the humble glass pearls appeared beside something almost unimaginably different: the 40.42-carat Lesotho III diamond, the spectacular stone associated with Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy.

The diamond sold for $2,587,500.

The fake pearls sold for $211,500.

Why did Jackie Kennedy’s glass necklace become so valuable?

There is another mystery.

Today, the Smithsonian identifies Kenneth Jay Lane as the designer of the necklace. But Sotheby’s did not name a maker in its 1996 catalogue. Lynda Resnick later wrote that Jackie had purchased the necklace at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1950s for roughly $35.

The problem?

Kenneth Jay Lane did not begin making jewellery until the early 1960s.

So who actually made Jackie Kennedy’s famous faux pearls?

And why did a woman who owned spectacular diamonds, rubies and other priceless jewels choose to wear something made of glass?

In this video, we follow the story from the Kennedy White House to Sotheby’s, from Jacqueline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. to Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Franklin Mint, Kenneth Jay Lane, Aristotle Onassis, Harry Winston, and the astonishing economics behind one of the strangest jewellery sales in auction history.

Because sometimes the most valuable thing about a jewel isn't what it's made of.

It's who wore it.

Watch until the end to see why $211,500 for fake pearls may have been one of the Franklin Mint's best bargains.