about us or about the retail­ers who make it an part of their fash­ion aes­thetic? Some­times I under­stand how par­tic­u­lar jew­elry designs work within the con­text of say, Tar­get, but with other retail­ers, such as JCrew, I’m just stupi­fied. I buy into JCrew’s preppy/moderne clothes. I appre­ci­ate their fab­ri­ca­tions, espe­cially the high qual­ity goods from renowned mills. I don’t really get their jew­elry though. What is it exactly? How does a wooden plaque pen­dant with a golden anchor say any­thing about either me, the wearer, or them, as the pur­veyor?

This is a sum­mer acces­sory that speaks of mar­itime plea­sures, but what if you are a ded­i­cated NYC land­lub­ber? Oh, well, then yes, there are those neo-sophisticated, not-worth-the-expense charm bracelets (I might also like to add here that the beauty of a charm bracelet lies in its quirkly char­ac­ter or the indi­vid­ual beauty of each ele­ment as well as the per­sonal mean­ing of the charms to whomever owns the bracelet—JCrew’s selec­tion has a theme-park feel that just isn’t gen­uine). More­over, I think these bracelets have a 1940s or even 50s inspi­ra­tion that isn’t in keep­ing with their cur­rent swing­ing sixties/early sev­en­ties cloth­ing state­ments. Why not try to cre­ate jew­elry that has an estate mood but also mod­ern sen­si­bil­ity so that it com­pli­ments ANY period of cloth­ing? Cliches in repro­duc­tion jew­elry end up at the bot­tom of the dresser drawer, col­lect­ing dust. Retail­ers on this level need to show that we appre­ci­ate the past but also find a way to way to express who we are today. Yes, I do mix and match vin­tage with contemporary–but I enjoy being cre­ative this way and mak­ing it my own. How­ever, that should be form of self-expression and not a test of tal­ents, there are far too many women out there who just want to look great and not have to think about it much—and that’s where stores like JCrew and Banana Repub­lic come in. With their research and resources, they could do better.

Banana Repub­lic is another sta­ple source that many women look to for some­thing trend-worthy and not ter­ri­bly expen­sive. How­ever, their jew­elry just doesn’t make sense to me. Occa­sion­ally I’ll see some­thing that smacks of style and then right next to it is a long lost design just wait­ing for that sad lit­tle wicker sale bas­ket they have at check-out. Right now their ear­rings have some sort of exotic South Asian flair and their bracelets con­sist of rather mod­ern, sculp­tural ban­gles, nests of beads, a cou­ple of non­de­script charm bracelets and a sin­gle exam­ple called the God­dess Bracelet that has some rela­tion to their ear­rings. Still my ques­tion remains unan­swered: What does this have to do with the clothes they’re show­ing? How can they work together in way that inspires the cus­tomer? Will a neck­lace be a great out-to-dinner piece and/or a lyri­cal note to add to a gar­den party ensem­ble? Just throw­ing these pieces onto a web­site or in a store dis­play explains very lit­tle and the open-endedness leaves me with notion that their jew­elry designs are merely an after­thought. My sug­ges­tion would be to offer fewer items and make them more impor­tant pieces, of bet­ter design and less tinsel.

Tar­get is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent in that there is no real cohe­sive state­ment being made there, just a lot of really great ideas. It’s more Moroc­can bazaar than Harper’s but the jew­elry isn’t pre­tend­ing to be some­thing it’s not. Today, I clicked my way through their web­site and found a quo­ta­tion bracelet that looked sus­pi­ciously like those made by Jea­nine Payer. Whether or not this par­tic­u­lar orna­ment was pro­duced by the designer was not men­tioned any­where on the site, and while I wouldn’t be sur­prised to find this to be true, it doesn’t mat­ter. The fact is that in addi­tion to their slew of fun, col­or­ful baubles, trin­kets, and some bet­ter jew­elry, they have their pulse on what’s going on fashion-wise as well as the ever-vacillating cul­tural zeit­geist. Per­sonal adorn­ment and style can be expressed in so many ways, with words, with gems or sim­ply with taste.