If you’ve followed the work of Marion Fasel, editor of The Adventurine, then the topic of her latest book might seem a bit like a “been there, done that” situation—what more is there to say about the history of diamond engagement rings that she (and the jewelry-loving public) do not already know?
Turns out, quite a bit. As anyone who reads The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance will discover, the accepted story of the evolution of diamond engagement rings from the 15th century to the present day has been a bit truncated and diluted over time. Even Fasel’s With This Ring: The Ultimate Guide to Wedding Jewelry, cowritten with her late mentor Penny Proddow and published in 2004 (and a mainstay of my personal library lo these 20 years), did not treat the cultural and historical trajectory of engagement rings with the gravitas and historical analysis and critique it deserved.
“I realized that no one—including myself and Penny—had really given engagement rings the jewelry history treatment that I gave to the animal jewelry at the Museum of Natural History book, or even B Is for Bulgari,” she tells JCK.
Put another way: “If anyone was writing up the history of art deco jewelry, you know what the history is. You know where it started. You know the premise of it. You know why things shifted. And I thought, I don’t know that about diamond engagement rings. And really rapidly, I realized the people that I banter with about jewelry history ideas didn’t either.”
Her new limited-edition, small-format hardcover book, produced in partnership with the Natural Diamond Council, somehow manages to encapsulate succinctly the history of engagement rings with more accuracy (and candor), using a chronology of more than 165 glorious images to put an informative visual in the topic.
On the one hand, The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance can serve the same purpose most pretty jewelry books do—they’re something to display in the lounge area of your store or offer for sale at the cash wrap. They are also great for gifting (think VIP clients, staff, or a fellow jewelry lover).
But Fasel’s scholarly approach ultimately serves up something much more robust. It’s a tack that quite a few journalists and thinkers have embraced in recent years, whether it’s a long-form article appearing in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, or episodes on podcasts like You’re Wrong About, Revisionist History, and Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man. Both types of media revisit moments in history to re-examine the facts that most of us have been told, only to find out there’s more to the story.
Ahead, just a few favorite examples of Fasel setting the record straight. As someone who has covered engagement rings for more than half her career as a jewelry editor, my take is that you come for this book’s elegantly packaged, scintillating storytelling but stay for the big reveals. Whatever the topic, we are all better for knowing the multiple layers of the history we have been taught—and putting it in the context of concurrent historical events and cultural influences.
Austrian Archduke Maximilian gets too much credit
If you’ve been covering engagement rings (or selling them) for most of your career, then at some point you likely were told that the first diamond engagement ring was given by the Archduke Maximilian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy in 1477. Various texts have posited that the archduke single-handedly started the centuries-old diamond engagement ring tradition. But Fasel looked at this timeworn tale with a critical eye and set out to investigate. The truth is, she says: “No one knows when the first engagement ring was. Diamond rings go back to ancient Greece, yes, but they started being worn by women during the Renaissance.” In the book, she highlights the point-cut diamond ring given by Costanzo Sforza, Lord of Pesaro to Camilla d’Aragona of Naples in 1475, an example that predates the Archduke Maximilian story. By the time an advisor to the archduke suggested in a letter that he give his bride a diamond ring, says Fasel, “it sounds like the idea was general at this point.” In other words, it was already de rigueur for an elite to propose with a diamond ring—the Austrian archduke was an “early adopter” but the idea does not originate with him.
Engagement rings were not exclusive to royalty
As she researched the history of engagement rings, Fasel says, “I kept on reading certain things that people believe which I could disprove, and one was that engagement rings were really only worn by royalty.” For example, she learned (through frequent correspondence with the librarians at Eton College in the U.K.) that the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning owned a crown heart rose-cut diamond ring with forget-me-nots on the side that was given to her by Robert Browning in the 1840s. Fasel also discovered a rose-cut diamond cluster ring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; merchant Samuel Verplanck, part of an influential New York family, presented it to his betrothed in 1760. “Obviously these are people with money, but still not royalty,” she says.
De Beers and the “A diamond is forever” mythology
“The history of diamond engagement rings—isn’t that a De Beers thing?” Fasel says she has heard this quip on more than a few occasions. “People think engagement rings came about in 1947 because of the ‘A diamond is forever’ campaign. A lot of coverage of diamond engagement rings seems to think it’s almost like a marketing conspiracy. And that’s simply not the case.” Fasel allows that De Beers helped popularize the idea of getting engaged with a diamond ring, but says this phenomenon did not emerge from out of nowhere. “What else was happening in 1947 simultaneously? Queen Elizabeth got engaged the same year, and no one ever talks about that. It was on the front page, righthand corner, of The New York Times.”
Meanwhile, there also was a wedding boom afoot in the United States—not because of the De Beers campaign, but because it was the postwar era and returning servicemen and their loves, separated for so long, could finally move forward with plans to tie the knot.
Fasel says that the intersection of these historical events is rarely talked about and it was “driving her nuts.”
So effectively, her book was a way to set her mind at rest (and enlighten the rest of us): “Diamond engagement rings are a beautiful thing, and a beautiful thing to represent a union of love,” she says. “That’s why they’ve lasted so long.”
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