Faux Luxury Life

I’ve added two statement pieces of costume jewelry to my collection lately, and what I’m enjoying most is what I can do with them.

One is a 1960s choker — gold-toned, a little imperfect, a little tarnished on the back, one crystal missing. The other is an unsigned 1940s-style grapevine necklace, lighter in construction, with dangling leaves and grapes that move almost like little bells. Well made and making it through the decades. One over 50 years old. The other approaching 100.

Neither one is precious in the museum sense.

They’re costume jewelry, both in imitation of finer jewelry and finer metals from another era.

And it is that source, a vastly different American era with its own visual language already attached to them, that fascinates and attracts me. They are not longer locked there in the past. So I can take the 1960s choker and put it with a peasant blouse, capri jeans, cat-eye glasses, and suddenly I’m borrowing from another decade without dressing like I’m in costume. I have my clutch, a Y2K gold croc embossed Kate Spade envelop back or clutch wallet.

Then another day, I can take the grapevine necklace and put it with a deep green dress, a crocheted duster, oversized sunglasses, and let it become something moodier and more romantic. I take my tote, made from a grandfathers wing back chair fabric we recovered, a zipper or flame stitch, with all the rust colors, fabric also from that decade. Poetic.

In my own closet, my own age, my own life, i can mix and match, style up or down, and decide how close to the original era do I want to stay.

That’s the fun of it.

I’m not trying to reproduce the 1940s or the 1960s faithfully. I’m borrowing the shapes, the drama, the glamour, the little visual tricks — and folding them into the life I actually live.

Right now I seem to be enjoying what I’ve started thinking of as my faux luxury life.

Not real diamonds. Not Fifth Avenue. Not old Hollywood money.

Just the feeling.

Gold against skin. Big sunglasses. A necklace that looks like it might have a story. A vintage purse. A deep green dress. A little theatricality in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day.

I grew up in a world of T-shirts and jeans, and for a long time I think I had very small ideas about what belonged to me. What I was allowed to wear. What kind of life I was supposed to have. What counted as practical.

Now I’m more interested in the creative process of play and where the research on interesting pieces take me.

Style has always been creative for me. It’s composition. Color. Texture. Proportion. Memory. A kind of wearable collage.

These old costume jewelry pieces make that even more interesting because they already arrive carrying something with them.

A decade.

A mood.

Someone else’s idea of glamour.

Then I get to interrupt it.

I get to make it mine.

Maybe that’s why collecting them feels so satisfying. It isn’t really about owning objects. It’s about having more ingredients.

More possibilities.

More ways to wake up and decide who I feel like being that day.

A little 1960s.

A little 1940s.

A little Kate Spade.

A little thrift shop.

A little old Hollywood.

A little Outer Banks.

Mostly me.

And maybe that’s what luxury feels like to me now anyway.

Not perfection.

Not status.

Not proving anything.

Just having enough ease in my life to play.

To notice.

To collect the shiny rocks.

To put on the strange old necklace.

To look in the mirror and think:

Well, this is fun.