How To Date Vintage Clothing, Jewelry & Handbags
Dating Vintage Clothing & Jewelry
Wouldn’t it be great if vintage pieces sported an actual date? Here are a few tricks of the trade to help you date vintage clothing, jewelry, and handbags
Dating Jewelry
For jewelry the three main ways to quickly date items are closures, backs, and jewelry marks. The earliest designs for brooch clasps were merely a long pin anchored into an open C dating from Victorian times. Other clasps looked like trombones or safety pins. More modern brooches have a locking rotating clasp.
Necklaces and bracelet closures had the same progression from primitive to modern closures. There are several websites plus many sites on Pinterest that have charts showing various types of clasps if you Google “dating jewelry clasps”.
The backs of jewelry, brooches, bracelets, and pendants also have a story to tell. Early costume jewelry usually had a back made of pot metal, made from a variety of inexpensive mixed metals.
During WWII with metal scarce, jewelry manufacturers turned to sterling silver. After the war a material called Rhodium was developed giving jewelry backs a distinctive shiny silver finish.
Later pieces from the late 1970s on, in either silver or gold metal had a rough back rather than a smooth finish.
On rhinestone or other glass stone pieces, how the stones are set may also give us clues. Riveted pieces and open back settings are usually older than fully enclosed settings
Jewelry marks are also a good indicator of age. Many manufacturers changed their marks over time. Countries that went through political transitions also have differences in their marks that help with dating. A good example is Germany whose marks range from Germany prior to WWII to Western Germany, West Germany and German Democratic Republic, for East Germany. A wonderful resource for dating jewelry company marks is the Researching Costume Jewelry Marks by Illusion Jewels.
Patent marks may also give us a general range. Jewelry manufacturers were not able to copyright their designs until 1958. So anything with an R was made after that year and anything with the patent-pending mark is 1958 or earlier. Nicer pieces often had patent marks on the design many of which may be found online through http://jewelrypatents.com/. Make sure you are researching a design patent rather than one for a mechanism whose design may have been used for many decades after the original patent date.
Dating Vintage Clothing
The same general rules from jewelry marks also apply to clothing and hats.
Many designers and countries changed their labels through the years. A good resource for this is the Vintage Fashion Guild. Also look for union labels, in fact anything labeled Made in the USA is probably vintage.
As with jewelry, types of closures also signal a vintage piece. Look for metal zippers rather than plastic; hand stitching instead of machine.
Knowing these few basic rules on age will help snap up that really cheap piece that the seller thinks is from the 1980s but is really from the 1920s. Also knowing how to date vintage clothing, jewelry & handbags will keep you from getting scammed by Amazon or other sellers that show up in a Google search on vintage dating.
Now you are armed with knowledge – let’s go SHOPPING!
