Emma de Sybel, vintage dealer and founder of Baroque Rocks in London, discusses the fabulous creations of the 1960s and 1970s.

Jewelry Connoisseur Podcast – Episode 7 – Season 2

Welcome to the Jewelry Connoisseur podcast. And now your host, Sonia Esther Soltani.

Welcome to the Jewelry Connoisseur podcast, a podcast for people in the jewelry industry to learn more and also jewelry lovers, who just want to expand their knowledge. Here we talk about everything that has to do with antique and vintage jewelry.

I am your host, Sonia Esther Soltani, the editor in chief of Rapaport. I edit a monthly magazine for the trade that covers everything from mining to retail. I'm also editing an online publication, called Jewelry Connoisseur, like this podcast and I curate an Instagram account, Rapaport Jewelry Pro. On all our platforms we try to educate our audience on diamonds, colored gemstones, antique jewelry and also contemporary design.

Sonia: Hi Emma. How are you?

Emma: Very well. Sonia, how are you?

Sonia: I'm great. You've just finished the Jubilee celebrations in London. So how is it?

Emma: Oh I have to say, they were utterly magnificent. I mean, something that I love. I actually cried because the last day was the pageant. And you had all these magnificent spectacles that, you know, all these people coming in and doing these fabulous kind of flutes down the Mall. And then at the very end, the Queen comes out and she is the monarch of all magnificent monarchs. She really is a phenomenal, phenomenal woman. And then I cried. But it was fabulous. I have to say really, really fabulous.

Sonia: Oh, that's wonderful. I'm happy we are recording this podcast of two such historical event. Why I wanted to have you on the podcast is not just because you're based in London, but I know you have a real passion for British modernist jewelry. So what is it? How do you define it?

Sonia: Because you're a vintage jewelry dealer in London, and I know you love this era. You know, You have pieces from the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, a bit further as well. But how did you come to start collecting these pieces?

Emma: I love gold. It's a fantastic I mean, the bigger, the bolder, the better. And I'm also very short. So anything that is enormous and is fun. But I started collecting because I spent a lot of time in the banking world. So I spent 15, 16 years at JP Morgan, as a woman there were very few women and you'd wear a skirt suit and you very seldom wore trousers suit and then I'd wear enormous jewelry to accentuate whatever I was wearing. And it was just a different kind of way of expressing yourself. And then I remember rather than paying my rent. I ridiculously went to a jewelry fair. I started seeing these pieces and I got carried away and I suddenly forgot that I had to pay my rent. And I was like, Oh my God, this is a disaster. I've started buying all this jewelry. And so this is what happened. And I just I love the pieces so much. And going back to the gold, I love the way that it moves, you know, it's such a malleable thing. But to be able to actually make it look in these pieces, it was phenomenal, phenomenal.

Sonia: And can you tell us a bit more about your practise? I know you upcycle some pieces, you source different pieces…

Emma: It's a very long process. So the first thing to do is I'm going to have every single piece polished. And I think the reason I do that is because I like clean-looking jewelry. It's got to look fabulous. I mean, if you're buying antique jewelry, you certainly did want to clean it. You want it to look from 100 years ago or more, 200 years ago. But these are 50-60 years old and they're so modern and so contemporary. Also gold needs to be bright and sassy and fabulous. So first that's why I take it to my jewelry polisher, who is the most magnificent man. He is called Leon and the chap who took it from was is called Sid. Now they do know that you would know about the jewelry polishing but the reason in the jewelry business that the polishers are so important is that they finish off all the pieces for you and they'll polish them up into new things. They take each piece, it takes about 45 minutes to polish, you know, clean up and everything. But where they make their money, and I find it so fascinating is in the gold dust. So when they're polishing your piece, you lose a few bits of magical gold dust, which doesn't really change the weight of the piece, but it just goes into that vacuum, which is a bit like a Henry the Hoover, I suppose. And at the end of the month or every five months, they take these enormous plastic bags full of what we would deem rubbish, and they take it down to the bullion guys and then they melt everything. They'll take out the silver section, they'll take out the copper, which is the alloy normally, and then they'll take out the gold. So he will make his money from the gold dust. Not from what I pay him to polish each piece, which I love. And that's why the term recycled gold is so hilarious, because nothing is wasted in the jewelry world and this is what I love. It is one of the most sustainable art forms out there because nothing is wasted. And I think that's wonderful. And then what I do is with the piece is if it is a signature piece, say like a Cartier or Bulgari or something like that, I will never touch it because you will destroy its value. However, if it is an unsigned, much less famous piece or anything, I will have a play sometimes if the piece warrants it. If the stone is cracked or it's a bright red garnet. So this amazing red gold as these pigeon's blood red garnet. They sometimes don't sell because it's deemed to be too old fashioned, too something that your grandmother would wear. And so what I do is go for popping colors. And so you have this kind of clash of color and it just brings the old mount into something very cool and very modern. And again, going back to the sixties and seventies, those mounts were already cool, they were already different and something that no one had seen before. That's what I love going back to the jewelry cleansing, the reason I went into the cleansing when I was at JP Morgan and again going back to the fact that I was one of the only females there, the chaps on my trading floor that would ask me what they should buy for their wives and girlfriends and mistresses or whatever, whoever it was for. And then I'd say, well, why don't you go to Grays Antique Market? This is where you find some fabulous vintage pieces and antique pieces. And they looked at me in absolute horror. They said, No, no, no, we want to have a piece that will resonate with them. And so they'd go downstairs. We were in Canary Wharf, which I called it the gilded cage, and downstairs in Canary Wharf was Tiffany's. It was marvellous. So now going to Tiffany's at Tiffany's was doing a cracking kind of business, and they'd go down there and buy the Elsa Peretti heart for their loved ones, whatever it was, but they'd all come back with a uniform piece. And then I started thinking, okay, this is madness. Why are you just getting all the females or males in your life exactly the same item? Why do you want to homogenize products? They said, Oh, well, because sometimes the jewelry is dirty. they don't know about energies, you know, who wore that piece or what was going through that. Maybe they'd been divorced or whatever, which is. And I thought, okay, well this is bonkers, absolutely bonkers, because that means that's taking away a whole kind of raft of people from being able to wear them. So I get these tuning forks and I cleanse every single piece. So metals have energies and this is actually quite scientific. And sometimes when a piece, you know, it depends on how hard you hit your tuning forks, but sometimes the sound is so strong that even the dog runs out of the room, so you just never know. So I'm just bringing it all back to center. I feel like I'm wearing some good vibes jewelry and I know that it's all going to be good.

Sonia: I love the fact that you keep the settings, the original settings, and you make it pop with different colored gemstones and it's all really lovely and in the spirit of this period as well. That was fun and party loving. And for our listeners, Emma is still happily married.

Emma: I have, you know, we've just had our wedding anniversary and it was 15 years, poor thing.

Sonia: Buying second-hand vintage already owned divorcee ring is okay.

Emma: Absolutely. You just have to sound cleanse them.

Sonia: What are the pieces, you have this magnificent pendant, the big rings, you know, at Baroque Rock, which is your studio. You go for a lot of cocktail rings and fun objects and really a lot of little meaningful pendants and charms. What are the styles from the sixties, seventies that are really, if someone would like to collect?

Sonia: That's such a fabulous overview of the designs and the designers and the styles. Thank you, Emma I love it. I think that's very comprehensive. And you know, what we did with you is that we gave you homework for this podcast. We asked Emma if she could read a book that was published last year called Modern British Jewellery Designers, 1960-1980. It's a collector's guide and it's by Mary Ann Wingfield and it was published by ACC Art Books. Is a beautiful book. It's like an introduction to the movement. It features 25 leading jewelry designers, one of them, of course, being Andrew Grima. And I think that's a great reference because it gives you such a nice overview of the movement. It covers a lot of the things that Emma just described in terms of styles and use of materials.

The Jewelry Connoisseur Podcast will be back after this break.

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Sonia: So Emma, first, did you enjoy the book?

Sonia: So obviously Grima, always comes up. The pieces are beautiful, the gemstones are gorgeous. I like a few John Donald as well and I just love the fact that they all played with the organic shapes and the gold is so well treated and so beautiful crafted. Each is such a piece of art. Each piece, you look at it and you think it's so vibrant. I think that it's a great book and really recommend it to our audience who wants to learn more. So Emma, we know that in your dream jewelry box there is definetely Andrew Grima, who else from this period would you like?

Emma: Gosh, I would definitely have some Grima. I would definitely have more Kutchinsky if I could get Elizabeth Gage. Oh, I can't believe I didn't even mention her. Mary Anna Wingfield talks about Elizabeth Gage. I love her work. I mean, she again use numismatic jewelry. Her pieces were bold, they're fabulous. So I'd love some of her pieces. Oh, yes, John Donald, Alan Gart. And then going back to David Deakin because his work is really interesting and there's a Greek designer who I absolutely love, is Ilias Lalaounis and the Lalaounis work I think just... Sonia is actually wearing a bracelet. I might actually have to come over to borrow it. But basically, and I would say any big boulders of absolute bling, and then I'd make quite a few jewelry boxes. It's not just one jewelry box of all that. I want a lot.

Sonia: We love greedy collectors.

Emma: I am such a greedy collector. I just one day, one day....

Sonia: Emma, there was such a wonderful deep dive into the sixties and seventies of British jewelry. It was fantastic. And I love the fact that you shared so much of the knowledge of also dealing with the pieces, the technical side of it, not just the collecting side and falling in love, but actually what it takes to bring back these pieces to life and make them so exciting. So we need more women like you.

Emma: Oh, well, Sonia I cannot thank you so much for having me on this podcast. It's been an absolute honor, so I'm really, really touched on. More to the point, thank you for opening my eyes even further by telling me to read this book because my goodness, this is brilliant. I'm going back saying everyone should get it. It is a fabulous book. I have a notebook that I use all the time and I've been annotating these notes and this seems to be far too many notes now. So now I have to commit it all to memory.

Sonia: But you shared so much with us today. Thank you so much, Emma. Thanks to everyone for listening.

Thanks for having joined us on this latest episode of the Jewelry Connoisseur podcast, you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google and YouTube. If you like this podcast, give us your feedback and make sure that you subscribe so you won’t miss any single episode. You also can find information on estate and antique jewelry on jewelryconnoisseur.net