Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s Hair Jewelry

Looking back at Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s hair jewelry–one of the most obscure yet enchanting designs from the celebrated icon.

Today, the Italian designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo (1933–1989) is best known for his mesmerizing rainbow silk gowns and embellished dresses covered in a menagerie of collaged references of Romany and Native American culture. But Sant’Angelo actually began his career as a jewelry designer, creating vivid plastic jewelry in the 1960s. Legendary editor Diana Vreeland was a fan.

But our favorite single thing the designer ever created? The colorful, whimsical hair jewelry. Think: jewelry that actually looked like hair, and synthetic hair-like jewelry placed in the hair. Giorgio di Sant’Angelo was one of the few designers who mastered merging inventive hair with fashion, also creating super massive wide lucite barrettes that model Veruschka famously wore, as well as multicolor spirals of rainbow braids, bows and brooches. “I like women to look imaginative. Costume jewelry is best when it really looks fake. My clothes are sensual. They have to have sexual attraction,” he told WWD in a 1968 interview. He was influenced by Rudi Gernreich and Galanos, two of his favorite designers according to the interview.

Hair in fashion is definitely trending right now: from Schiaparelli’s ties woven out of hair to Simone Rocha’s hair earrings and the overwhelming collector mania surrounding antique mourning and sentimental jewelry–hair as a fashion accessory is back from the Victorian times.

Little is documented about Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s hair jewelry. The designer passed away from lung cancer in 1989, but his design associate Martin Price continued to design collections under his name until 1992. After that, the brand closed down and he donated the entire Sant’Angelo archive to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Though the Met has the aforementioned hair jewelry digitally documented, the museum itself does not share any specific information about these pieces in particular.

“He wanted to empower women and that’s why he referenced Greek goddesses, amazonian queens, Peruvian princesses and tribal beauties in his work,” Price told Dazed. “It was about fashion and fantasy and that’s why Diana Vreeland adored him and helped him explode on to the fashion scene.”

Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s brooches, pins and accessories that mimic hair were likely made with Dynel, which is a material other designers like Hattie Carnegie were using at the time for inventive, bright, hairy jewelry. For example, Hattie Carnegie made these incredible Dynel pins with neon colored fringe that mirrored the texture of hair. The aforementioned WWD article from 1968 cites Dynel as one of the materials Sant’Angelo worked with. Dynel was a synthetic fiber first used for marine applications, but later popularized by retro future designers like Pierre Cardin, who used it to make heat-molded dresses in the 1960s. But you can also find Dynel wigs and hair extensions from the 1960s all over eBay, so the material also essentially functioned as the go-to synthetic hair at the time.

Seeing Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s hair jewelry in person would be a dream. It seems like each piece may have been one of a kind since we’ve yet to see any of them for sale anywhere in recent years, and we’ve also not seen them in any museum setting. Here’s an idea for the next Costume Institute exhibition: simply Giorgio di Sant’Angelo or hair as fashion.

Photos// Via Met Museum

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