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Since 1973
Lady Holiday buys costume jewellery from estates across the American South — mostly from families clearing a relative’s dressing table. Every piece arrives undocumented, and the work is figuring out what it is.
Costume jewellery rarely carries a date. What it carries is construction. A screw clasp on earrings points at the 1950s; a clip-back with a flat paddle says later. Rolled gold tells you one thing, modern electroplate another. Glass has bubbles and weight that resin does not.
Where a maker’s mark survives — Trifari, Coro, a Rebecca Ray buckle stamp — the decade narrows quickly. Where it does not, we date by materials and finish and say so plainly. A listing that reads “1950s–60s” means we are confident about the range and not about the year.
If we cannot place a piece at all, the listing says that too. Guessing confidently is how fakes get laundered into collections.
Vintage condition language is used loosely across the trade. Here is exactly what we mean by ours.
Nothing here is reproduced or restocked. When a piece sells, the listing closes for good. That is the nature of estate buying: we get what a family had, and then it is gone.
It also means the photographs matter more than usual. You cannot see this exact piece anywhere else, so each listing carries six to twelve shots — the clasp, the reverse, the maker’s mark, the piece in hand for scale — and every one of them is described in text as well.
