A few days ago I was rushing around Glasgow’s city centre when a shop window saying “Classic Vintage Jewellery” caught my eye. I’m a bit of a jewellery addict, something I have developed from a very young age, so I immediately stopped in my tracks and decided to check it out.
As soon as I stepped into Noelle Carroll’s shop I realised that this isn’t your usual vintage jewellery
retailer. Art Deco cabinets line the walls, each of them full of rhinestone costume jewellery, colourful plastic necklaces from the ‘50s, brooches, earrings, bracelets and rings from the ‘30s. Chunky pieces are juxtaposed to delicate and more fragile necklaces and there are even a few (very) covetable pieces by Jakob Bengel displayed in an old tobacco cabinet from Perth.
Chatting with the shop owners, Barry Young and Noelle Carroll, I discovered how they got into jewellery: they used to have a shop in Westport, Ireland, that sold 20th Century collectibles and, one day, an unsigned plastic brooch with an amazingly intricate design ended up in the shop. “At the time I didn’t know anything about jewellery,” Barry recalls, “but the idea that someone could have put so much creativity, so much effort and such wonderful sense of design into an object that was intrinsically really not worth much fascinated me.”
Barry might not look like your conventional jewellery fan – he’s indeed a 6 foot 3, 23 stone ex-rugby player – but the universe of classic vintage and costume jewellery fascinated him. Soon the couple started getting a few more pieces in their shop in Ireland and, within six or eight months, the entire shop had been taken over by jewellery. “We were based in a town of a few thousands people, in the far West of Ireland, 50 miles from Galway, so it was quite remote, yet it was a tremendous success,” Barry says.
As their interest grew, their research into jewellery and into the history of various designers got deeper. Their passion grew as they realised all the pieces they got in their shop were basically one-offs. “We’ve been going into this business for a few years now and, out of the thousands and thousands of pieces we had, only two were the same,” Barry claims. “We always tell our customers that if you find the same piece we sell here somewhere else you can keep it and we’ll give your money back.”
Both Barry and Noelle cherish jewellery from the Art Deco period and recall the discovery of German designers Theodor Fahrner and Jakob Bengel’s art as one of the highlights of their journey into the world of jewellery. Noelle’s favourite piece at present is a striking Jakob Bengel silver necklace with a single blue bubble pendant. “Sometimes our favourite piece is the one we sell to someone who really likes it,” Barry adds, “seeing people’s enthusiasm for the shop and the stock is very encouraging.”
Opening a vintage jewellery shop in the heart of Glasgow’s city centre also meant to find the right pieces of furniture for it. Barry and Noelle decided to go for Art Deco cabinets and spent weeks looking for the ideal pieces of furniture at various auctions. “There are still a few pieces we have in mind to add to the shop,” Noelle says. “We see this space as a sort of work-in-progress.”
The work-in-progress ethos is applied also to the stock as the couple keeps on researching new and exciting designs from different markets. New pieces arrive to the shop every week from all over Europe, in particular from France, Germany and Italy, and from the States. “We built up a lot of contacts over there, from California to Canada,” Barry says. “There were some good costume jewellery designers in the ‘50s in Britain but their stuff is hard to come by, while American manufacturers produced more in terms of quantities, so you can still find a lot of their accessories over there.”
So far the response to the shop has been fantastic both with local fashionistas and vintage/costume jewellery fans. “Glasgow is such a fashionable stylish city and people want to stay away from the high street fashion that is in style for one season and then is gone,” Noelle explains. “A vintage piece is actually immune to fashion trends, because it has been around for many decades, besides, there’s only going to be one, and you’re going to be the only person wearing it.”
Another advantage of vintage jewellery is that it represents in more than one way an investment. “The prices we have been paying for the pieces have been going up,” Barry reveals, “but buying such pieces of jewellery also means investing in social history, classic elegance and style. These pieces are definitely forever, they are not to be treated as something to throw away.”
For further information about recent stock additions, contact Noelle Carroll, Classic Vintage Jewellery, 5 Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, UK.
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