In Jewelry, Tassels Hold Sway

Chaumet’s Ronde de Pierres earrings feature nearly 2 carats of sapphires and include beads of garnets, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds.

 If there is one embellishment that has appeared in every form of the decorative arts — from interiors to accessories, across cultures and times — it is undoubtedly the tassel.

Universally considered an adornment, the tassel owed its ubiquity, at least in early days, to its functional side. Anyone working with textiles “had to prevent the thread of fabric from unraveling,” said Frank Everett, sales director at Sotheby’s jewelry department in New York. And, he added, “once you had the tassel hanging around, we wanted to make it decorative, attractive and beautiful.”

Tassels were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. In the 14th and 15th centuries, they were made of silk, which Mr. Everett said was as expensive as gold at the time. As an indicator of opulence, the tassel naturally was used in jewelry: One of history’s most infamous necklaces — the subject of the so-called Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a scandal that discredited Marie Antoinette and the French monarchy before the French Revolution — was, in fact, an elaborate confection of diamond pendants and tassels. And by the 18th century, pompoms, the round version of the item, were adorning Hussars’s shakos (military hats) in Hungary.

While it was tossed aside in the sterile ’90s, the tassel recently has been swinging back into fashion.

Tassels adorned Jennifer Lawrence’s wrist in one photograph for Dior’s Resort 2018 campaign. During Gucci’s Resort 2019 show in Arles, France, Alessandro Michele had them dangling from shawls, swaying over coats and even prominently featured in the design of one of the collection’s printed fabrics.

In jewelry, Mr. Everett said, the current rage for tassels began in 2011 when Natalie Portman wore a pair of Tiffany & Co. rubellite tassel earrings to accept her best actress award for “Black Swan.”

This year, tassels were everywhere in the fall haute joaillerie collections: Referencing Grimms’ fairy tales at Van Cleef & Arpels, modern sub-Saharan art at Chaumet, the excess of the 1980s in Bulgari’s Wild Pop collection, and colors linked to cultures in Cartier’s Coloratura collection. And Pompon is the French name of Boucheron’s permanent collection dedicated to tassels; it also included them in its latest high jewelry collection, Nature Triomphante.

At Van Cleef & Arpels, Catherine Cariou, the house’s heritage director, showed a 1920s-era advertisement picturing a flapper with shingled hair dancing as she displayed a sautoir with a tassel pendant and, from the 1950s, a bracelet of four twisted gold ropes ending with a tassel.

She noted that the house’s signature Zip necklace, transformable into a bracelet, always features a tassel. It is a style that is still in demand, according to Mr. Everett, who added that in May, he sold a 1970s ruby and sapphire-adorned Zip necklace with matching earrings for $506,965, 10 times the set’s estimated sale price.

This year, Van Cleef & Arpels featured a tassel of cultured pearls and sapphires on the Reinette transformable sautoir, enhanced by a 5.35-carat cushion-cut green tourmaline and a 59.78-carat cabochon-cut chalcedony.

To create tassels, the house’s artisans thread pearls or beads on strands of soft Bruyère silk. They tie a knot between each piece to protect them from knocking together and to ensure that, in case of breakage, all the pearls or beads would not be lost.

Guided by the contemporary Kenyan artist Evans Mbugua, Chaumet unveiled its Trésors d’Afrique collection that pays homage to the string and tassel jewelry of the continent. In a pair of transformable earrings, for example, beads of red spinel, emerald and round black spinel were used to create tassel shapes, evoking the ornaments of the Dinka people of Sudan and the Masai.

Chaumet’s beads of hard stone or diamond are pierced by a glyptician, the industry term for a gem cutter, and then strung on resilient fil d’or, or gold thread; silk is used for pearls and more fragile stones. In the Terres d’Or necklace, the rubies are held by a Kevlar thread in red, as it has to match the gems’ color.

A well-known example of Chaumet’s mastery of tassels is an archive piece from the 1920s: the Bayadère necklace, a cascade of seed pearls ending with two long tassels topped with platinum domes fringed with sapphires, a design inspired by Indian dancers.

In its Wild Pop collection, Bulgari used a 35.02-carat cushion-cut emerald to dominate long fringes of colored emerald beads. Lucia Silvestri, the house’s creative director, said the Italian jewelry house has used three tassel variations: beads of pink gold, oval-shaped colored gems such as sapphires and rubies and small colored diamonds. Those, she said, were in an irregular cut called money shape; when used in a tassel they “are very pleasant to the touch, are very soft; they have an ancient taste even if used with a contemporary design.”

Tassels are feminine, she added, saying that there is something poetic about touching the gems or beads to hear them striking one another. “I often wear a necklace from our Musa collection with a tassel,” she added. “Sometimes I find myself playing with it.”

Beyond the major high jewelry houses, other designers also are known for their tassel play. “Earrings with emerald tassels have been worn by our maharanis,” said the Indian designer Bina Goenka, who created earrings from strands of natural pearls knotted around an organically shaped piece of coral, “ and they are a symbol of high jewelry that does not depend on large stones.”

The Indian jewelry house Amrapali, thanks to the improvements in drilling techniques, likes to juxtapose pearls with harder stones like emeralds, as in a pair of earrings from its Jharna collection. The London-based designer Alice Cicolini created a necklace of hand-carved maple, hand-painted in Kabul, that was meant to be slung around the neck so two pompoms on long silk rayon threads would sway with the wearer’s movements.

The Lucky collection by Carolina Bucci has bracelets and necklaces made as a single rope of twisted silk threads and golden chains, with tassels at both ends. The designer rarely uses clasps so, she said, the tassel “brings the more structured part of the piece to a soft and supple conclusion.” Ms. Bucci’s pieces are hand woven in Florence, Italy, on a Renaissance-era loom once used to make Florentine textiles but now updated to weave gold threads.

The Munich jewelry house Hemmerle employs tassels “for the immense movement they create within a piece and their ability to capture light in unique ways,” said Christian Hemmerle, a fourth-generation family member now at the house’s helm. In celebration of its 125th anniversary, Hemmerle this fall released a capsule collection that included two pairs of tasseled earrings with turquoise, malachite and tsavorite beads. The inspiration? Ancient Egypt.

As Mr. Everett of Sotheby’s put it: The “tassel is sometimes in, sometimes out, yet always in.”

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