Essay 03 · How to Wear Pearls — And Other Lessons from a Very Good Party
By midnight, the evening has usually become a little less composed.
There is lipstick on a champagne glass, laughter carries across the room, and the earrings chosen so carefully earlier that evening are simply along for the ride.
This is generally a good sign.
Jewellery is so often presented to us in perfect stillness — resting in velvet boxes, carefully displayed, photographed under immaculate light.
But jewellery was never really meant to behave itself.
Neither, apparently, were the guests at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball.
On the evening of November 28, 1966, several hundred guests arrived at New York's Plaza Hotel carrying one of the most coveted invitations in America.
Capote had spent months assembling the guest list for the masquerade he was giving in honour of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. The rules were simple: black and white, masks compulsory.
Almost everything else was excessive.
Frank Sinatra came with Mia Farrow. Lauren Bacall was there. So were Gloria Vanderbilt, Lee Radziwill, Norman Mailer, Henry Fonda, Andy Warhol and an extraordinary cross-section of writers, politicians, artists, aristocrats and people who were famous largely for being invited to parties such as this one.
Oscar de la Renta arrived wearing a black cat mask.
Beside him, Françoise de Langlade — then editor-in-chief of French Vogue and later his wife — wore its gloriously extravagant white counterpart.
And Gloria Guinness had a problem.
Her white gown and mask had been commissioned from the couturier Castillo. But she could not decide which jewellery to wear: a magnificent diamond necklace or a ruby choker.
It is difficult to imagine a more agreeable problem.
Françoise de Langlade apparently supplied the answer.
Wear both.
So Guinness did.
The jewels were reportedly so heavy that she joked she would have to spend the following day in bed recovering from them.
One hopes there was breakfast service.
And while his guests arrived wrapped in couture and important jewels, Capote himself wore a small black mask from F.A.O. Schwarz.
It cost 39 cents.
There are lessons in life that take years to learn. And then there is Truman Capote demonstrating in a single evening that a 39-cent mask can hold its own perfectly well in a room full of extraordinary jewels.
Perhaps pearls deserve a little of the same freedom.
For something created by an oyster, they have accumulated an astonishing number of rules.
There is the pearl necklace. The little black dress. The neat chignon. The appropriate occasion.
All beautiful.
All perfectly correct.
And perhaps correctness is where the trouble begins.
Because when women wonder how to wear pearls without looking old-fashioned, the pearl itself is rarely the problem.
It is everything behaving politely around it.
Put the same pearl beside an unexpected sweep of gold, an imperfect shape, a diamond, a silk dress with a bare shoulder — and suddenly it feels different.
Pearls are rather good at this.
Their beauty has always contained a contradiction. They are precious but organic, luminous rather than brilliant, at home among royalty and extraordinary jewels yet born inside something considerably less glamorous at the bottom of the sea.
Perhaps we have been taking them too seriously.
There is, after all, no requirement that modernity must mean dressing everything down.
We have become very good at wearing beautiful things casually: pearls with denim, diamonds with a T-shirt, an evening bag in daylight.
But sometimes a woman wants the silk dress.
The table at eight. The shoes she cannot walk particularly far in. The earrings that are just a little more than necessary.
This does not make her old-fashioned.
It makes her dressed up.
The following morning, the silk dress may be over a chair and the shoes hopefully located.
The pearls, however, can simply be worn again.
With denim, a knit or a white shirt, they become something else. Perhaps that is the easiest answer to how to wear pearls casually: don't work too hard at making the pearls casual.
Let them become part of the way you already dress.
A beautiful piece of jewellery does not become less beautiful because nobody has invited you to the Plaza.
Nor does it need to wait patiently in a box until somebody does.
There is a photograph from Capote's ball of Oscar de la Renta and Françoise de Langlade in their matching cat masks.
More than half a century later, it still looks fabulous.
Not tasteful.
Not timeless.
Fabulous.
There is an important distinction.
Fashion dates. Hairstyles date. Parties end. Even the most carefully guarded guest list eventually becomes history.
But pleasure has a remarkable way of surviving all of them.
Perhaps that is why we still look at photographs from evenings like Capote's and wish, just slightly, that we had been there.
Not because we want to recreate 1966.
We want what they were having.
The anticipation of getting dressed. The absurdity. The beauty. The possibility that dinner might turn into dancing. The story you tell the next morning.
And something beautiful at your ears while it happens.
So how should you wear pearls?
With silk, certainly.
With denim, absolutely.
With black.
With gold.
With the dress that has been waiting for somewhere worth wearing it.
Wear them to dinner. Wear them on Tuesday.
And occasionally, perhaps, wear both.