Photo Credit: Vintage Vault Classics
As 2023 unfolds, let's talk for a moment about recent antique jewelry trends. But before we get to the meat of the topic, I'd like to start off with a short story. I promise it's relevant - really!
Not long ago I was browsing listings for vintage and antique jewelry on Etsy, hoping to find a bargain.
This is definitely not as glamorous as it might sound.
My process involves wading through hundreds of listings looking for that one piece that wows me while sporting a reasonable price. These are much harder to find than you might think. In my estimate, only about 25 listings out of 1000 will be worth looking at more closely. Of those 25 listings, only 1 or 2 will be potential buys. That is an ultimate hit rate of 0.1% to 0.2% - not exactly rich pickings!
In any case, I eventually stumbled across a piece that fit my requirements. It was a bold 1940s Retro era floral brooch crafted in sumptuous 14 karat white gold, set with round-cut diamonds and marquise-cut rubies. This brooch had a lot going for it. It weighed in at an extraordinarily heavy 16.3 grams, meaning that the gold content of the piece alone was worth $50 more than the asking price!
It was also set with over two dozen brilliant-cut diamonds of various sizes, totaling more than 2 carats in weight. The large central diamond was not brilliant-cut, but was instead an Old European cut stone that I estimated at close to 40 points in weight. This mix of modern brilliant-cut diamonds and Old European cut diamonds in the same piece wasn't uncommon in 1940s jewelry. In any case, the Retro brooch was stunning; it practically dripped with jewels!
There were however, a couple of things I didn't love about the brooch.
The 17 marquise-cut rubies set at the perimeter of the brooch were all flame fusion synthetics. Although period correct and perfectly acceptable in a vintage piece of this era, I would have of course preferred natural rubies.
The Retro styling of the piece was also imperfect.
While Retro era jewelry is supposed to be bold - and this piece certainly was - it was simultaneously a little unfocused or amorphous in execution. I suspect that the piece was made in the late 1940s/early 1950s during the transition from Retro to Mid-Century design. To the detriment of the piece, it incorporated design elements from both styles.
Sometimes this happens in old jewelry.
Despite these shortcomings, I found the Retro brooch to be a compelling investment. The gold content of the piece more than covered its purchase price; the intrinsic value of the diamonds and any artistic value the brooch had were simply icing on the cake. The asking price was $490, but the seller was having a 30% off sale at the time. As a result, this lovely and authentic Retro brooch could be had for a mere $343!
I placed my order and then eagerly awaited my prize to be shipped.
Unfortunately, life had other plans.
A couple days after placing the order, the seller reached out to inform me that she couldn't find the item in her inventory. Apparently, the brooch had been sold at a trade show a couple months earlier and had subsequently never been marked as sold in her books by accident. And just like that, the deal that I thought was there…evaporated.
I was terribly disappointed, but these things happen.
What this experience really underscored for me was just how difficult it has become to find investment grade vintage karat gold jewelry below the $500 price point in 2023. This troubling antique jewelry trend is a dramatic departure from the situation just a few years ago, when fine vintage material was reasonably plentiful for $400 or even $300. Now those same pieces are only offered for $700 or $800 - sometimes more!
I have some theories about why this happened and what the future may hold for the antique jewelry market.
Vintage Karat Gold Jewelry ($500 to $1,000) for Sale on eBay
As with many things in our lives, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is at least partially to blame for the skyrocketing price of fine old jewelry. When people were trapped in their homes due to the lockdowns, some entertained themselves with Netflix, others with online gambling and quite a few, apparently, with online shopping for vintage jewelry.
We don't know how large the influx of new collectors/admirers hunting for sleek Art Deco pendants, whimsical Edwardian rings or bold Retro bracelets was, but it was significant enough to increase prices substantially across the board.
As I previously mentioned, there is vanishingly little good vintage karat gold/platinum jewelry supply left in the market below the $500 price point. There isn't even that much in the $500 to $1,000 range, although there is certainly some. It is only above the psychologically important $1,000 mark that you begin to find plentiful numbers of high quality vintage and antique pieces.
This inflation driven antique jewelry trend has been a long time in coming.
For about 25 years - from the early 1990s to the late 2010s - pricing for fine vintage jewelry was fairly stable, with only modest increases often related to the rising underlying value of a piece's gold or gemstone content. Yes, there were pockets of strength during that time in areas like signed designer pieces (Cartier, Bulgari, Tiffany, Bucheron, etc.) and those set with very valuable stones (superb quality emeralds, rubies, sapphires or diamonds greater than 1 or 2 carats in weight). But for most other segments of the vintage jewelry market, price appreciation proceeded at a leisurely 1% to 3% per annum for better than two decades.
The last few years since 2020 have blown this formerly reliable trend completely out of the water. Now good quality antique jewelry is experiencing 5% to 20% price increases every year - and that is on top of the approximately 50% one-time jump in prices around 2021.
Increased demand from new collectors isn't the only dynamic at work, however.
There is also a persistently shrinking vintage jewelry supply due to the fact that the Silent and Boomer generations who once owned/inherited 1950s and earlier jewelry are now in terminal demographic decline. It is a truism of the estate sale business that the bulk of items found in most liquidating estates will be no older than about 60 years old. This means that most jewelry coming out of estates right now is from the 1960s or later. I explored this concept in greater depth in an article titled "The Demographics of Antiques".
We can therefore infer that older antique jewelry from the 1950s and earlier will only become scarcer as time goes on - with commensurate price increases, of course!
So what is a vintage jewelry connoisseur or investor to do?
Well, I see four possible choices.
First, you could soldier on looking for the few remaining good quality karat gold pieces of vintage jewelry that are still available under $500. It would require a great deal of knowledge and patience for this strategy to pay off. And, unfortunately, the day will eventually come - probably sooner than we would hope - when there is simply nothing worthwhile left to be had at this price point.
I would also like to point out that a lot of the nicer vintage jewelry I've found recently in this category only technically qualifies from a price perspective. In other words, the asking price is $475 or $495 - a stone's throw from $500. I fear that the days of really nice antique pieces being offered at $250 or $300 is probably over.
Vintage Scandinavian Modernist Jewelry for Sale on eBay
Another strategy would be to simply throw in the towel and expand your budget. This would mean moving up to the $500 to $1,000 tier when shopping for antique jewelry. Even here, I don't think there is a great selection available at the moment. But it is definitely a more viable option than trying to bottom-feed below $500.
When shopping in this price range I would emphasize solid karat gold or platinum jewelry that is set with sizable precious stones, if at all possible. In my opinion, it is very difficult to find non-gem set gold jewelry that is investment grade. And while there are always exceptions to every rule, a piece would have to be really special to be investment-oriented without gemstones.
A third approach would be to switch to vintage costume jewelry. The real advantage here is that you would be able to afford the best of the best - the top of the product stack - for under $500. Relatively few costume pieces sell for more than that, although some are starting to.
Vintage costume jewelry was also usually very on-point, stylistically speaking. Costume jewelry manufacturers always embraced the prevailing style trends of their age. So if you crave that big, expensive-looking, gem-studded Retro or Mid-Century look, but have a hopelessly small beer budget, then costume jewelry is a possibility.
Unfortunately, these are the only good things I can say about vintage costume jewelry. Costume jewelry almost always has zero intrinsic value. In addition, it was a mass produced product with no crossover between famous makers of fine jewelry and those of costume jewelry.
Therefore, I don't consider vintage costume jewelry to be investible and do not believe it will have a return profile that is nearly as strong as high quality vintage karat gold jewelry in the future. Vintage costume jewelry appeals to the specialist or casual collector only - not the investor.
A final scenario would be to concentrate on Modernist jewelry from the late 1950s to the 1980s. I especially like Modernist pieces from the Scandinavian countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
Most of the Modernist jewelry in this price range will use sterling silver as its primary medium. Nonetheless, its organic shapes, eclectic themes and sweeping lines instinctively appeal to a broad range of people. And few peoples produced vintage Modernist jewelry to the same level of artistic accomplishment as the Scandinavians did.
Although tremendously beautiful, Modernist jewelry is still affordable for two different reasons.
First, it isn't old enough to have rolled off the demographic wave I mentioned earlier. This means it is still relatively abundant in the marketplace. Secondly, Modernist jewelry is often made with lower intrinsic value materials such as sterling silver, quartzes, amber, enamel, etc. This limits the scrap value of most Modernist pieces, helping to keep them in a lower price range.
Photo Credit: inScandinavia
Although relatively inexpensive, this vintage Danish Modernist Sterling silver bracelet from the 1970s is mounted with bright green chrysoprase gemstones which create visual interest.
But don't let the low prices fool you.
Modernist jewelry was often hand-made to a very high artistic and technical standard. In addition, examples of Scandinavian origin were usually at the cutting-edge of style for their era and were often clearly hallmarked as to maker, country, city and date! As an added bonus, it is not uncommon to find mixed metal Modernist jewelry rendered in sterling silver generously accented with solid karat gold elements. This helps separate high quality Modernist jewelry from less intrinsically valuable costume jewelry.
If you are interested in vintage jewelry as an investment and find yourself absolutely unable to exceed the $500 or $600 price barrier, then I wholeheartedly recommend Modernist jewelry as your best option.
For the first time in decades, inflation has finally found its way into the world of vintage jewelry. This is both a good and a bad thing. It is good because people are finally recognizing the value of fine vintage and antique jewelry, which had previously been ignored. But it is also bad because we can no longer buy older, gorgeous jewelry at unbelievably low prices anymore.
But I have a final bit of good news for vintage jewelry connoisseurs and investors. The U.S. economy - and with it the global economy - is almost certainly going to plunge into a severe recession by the end of 2023. When this happens there will be a 6 to 18 month window of temporarily reduced antique jewelry prices. This will give the financially savvy hard asset investor one last chance to snag a bargain in the world of high quality vintage jewelry.
Read more thought-provoking Antique Sage trend articles here.
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