︎

Rachael Skingle

My Work, My Writing,
and Me.
My name has an extra 'a' and I have an extroverted nature. 

I'm a creative communicator with a love of sandwiches, clever copy, and interesting design.

I don't like spelling 'necessary' or thinking about how deep the ocean is. But I'm working on both of them.

︎    ︎    ︎  

Thoughts on Roland Barthes ‘From Gemstones to Jewellery’.

January 2019

I have been reading the sociologist Roland Barthes’ anthology ‘The Language of Fashion’, and one of his essays has particularly struck me. In ‘From Gemstones to Jewellery’, Barthes discusses the impact jewellery has had on man, how it has changed and the ideas that have remained behind it.
He starts the essay by talking about the ‘gemstone’, the unblemished and unadorned ‘mineral substance’. Barthes reminds us that the extraction of the gems and precious stones from below the ground, would have linked them to thoughts on Hell in past reasoning. Gems had escaped the “subterranean caverns where humanity’s mythic imagination stored its dead.” They take on a new importance as a link to humanity and the underworld – a link that we do not have to Heaven. This was perhaps a reminder that it was easier to be brought down to Hell, than to be raised up to Heaven. Barthes writes that the gemstone was a symbol of Hell with its ‘fundamental characteristic; the inhuman’. I disagree with this, as Hell is nothing if not made up of the worst of humanity, it is intrinsically linked to the wrong side of human emotions and the people who push them too far. We cannot disassociate the idea of Hell as the ‘underworld’, from the ‘bad’ people who supposedly end up there. Hell, as a concept cannot exist without people acting on their desires and ending up there, unlike gemstones that cannot act on, or even have emotions. The belief that gems came from Hell I can understand, due to the past imagined ‘geography’ of Hell as underground, but I do not believe that we can compare the two on a more emotional level.

While I do disagree with Barthes on his beliefs on Hell and jewellery, I find his ideas evolving tastes in jewellery to be extremely accurate. He examines past and present (to the time of writing, 1966) views on what makes ‘good taste’ in jewellery, and comments on why they may have changed. Owning and displaying fine gemstones and jewellery was once considered to be the pinnacle of power, and thus, taste – “the gemstone becomes the very concept of price; it is worn like an idea, that of a terrific power, for it is enough for it to be seen for this power to be demonstrated.” The finer the gems displayed, the more powerful the person wearing them was thought to be. This is no longer the case, with the introduction of imitation gems into jewellery ‘saturating’ the market and effectively democratising jewellery. “It is no longer subservient to the law of highest price nor to that of being used only one way, such as for a party or sacred occasion.” I find this observation by Barthes to be cannily accurate, as the ‘maximalist’ jewellery seen as a display of power in the past, would nowadays be seen as vulgar and would instead present an idea that the person is overcompensating and is without ‘true’ power. Jewellery to display ‘true’ power would instead be understated and discreet.

Through reading this essay in ‘The Language of Fashion’, it has encouraged me to think more on how fashion can be a sociological marker for attitudes and practices of the time. This makes me wonder what we are wearing without thought now, that will develop a different meaning in the future…