Reminiscing on Vivienne Westwood snail jewelry.
As far as fashion brands go, Vivienne Westwood has built a history of provocative jewelry that challenges the norms. Beyond all the logo-coded orbs are decades of unusual motifs reinvented, ranging from teddy bears and hearts to rhinestone-encrusted phallic symbols. But one of the label’s most memorable and covetable jewelry styles of all time are the snail necklaces, bracelets and brooch from the Spring/Summer 2000 collection.
Westwood titled the collection Summertime, and it served as the designer’s last ever collection of the 20th century, presented in late 1999. She referenced Bacchus, Roman god of wine and revelry and of course, the concept of Bacchanalia: the debaucherous descent into madness and rebellious chaos.
Models wore sheer ruffled plaid tops, Romanesque capes, classic rococo Westwood sculpted dresses and lots of garden party style skirts and dresses printed with flora and fauna. Some models wore pageant style gowns and others wore sculptural straw hats or messy hard hats. And then: snail jewelry!
The snails, with their real shells and silver bodies, came in the form of necklaces (strung with lady bugs: another Westwood signature motif), attached to wooden bangles, and single brooches, placed beautifully and haphazardly all over lightweight jackets or cinched on t-shirts. Photos of the snail jewelry on the runway is nearly impossible to find, which is why it sometimes mistakenly gets attributed to Vivienne Westwood’s spring 2002 collection. Pieces are nearly impossible to find on the secondhand market today, as they were sparingly produced. In 2014, Vivienne Westwood brought back archival re-editions of the snail jewelry in gold colorways. Even the re-edition is hard to find today, but I have one of the spring 2000 brooches on the way from an Ebay seller now, which is what inspired this post.
Vivienne Westwood’s snail jewelry combines all the elements of the brand we love most: beauty, provocation, nature and irony.
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