Uncovering the Cultural History of the Nameplate Necklace
Marcel Rosa-Salas has been enamored by nameplate jewelry—typically gold necklaces that announce the wearer’s name in elaborate script—for as long as she can remember. In the predominantly Puerto-Rican and Italian Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up, there was a jewelry store across the street from her home, and every day, she’d pass a case of nameplate necklaces in the window. "There was just something about the flourish of them, the shine, the fact that they were pieces of jewelry that proclaimed your presence to the world," she tells Broadly.To get more news about Custom Name Necklace, you can visit koalaprint.com official website.
She finally received her first nameplate as a young teen when she wrote her mother a letter explaining that her high test scores showed she was responsible enough to own the $200 piece of jewelry, and that it would mark a coming-of-age moment in her life. It worked, and she’s been collecting nameplate jewelry ever since—including pieces featuring other identity markers beyond her name, such as a ring that reads "INFJ" (her Myers-Briggs personality type) and bamboo-style hoop earrings that say "pensive," her favorite word. "I love the cognitive dissonance that it evokes to have a bamboo earring that some may call 'ostentatious' or 'tacky' as an insult but to have it be paired with a word that is ostensibly its opposite—and kind of embrace that contradiction," she says. "That encapsulates who I am."
For nameplate owners like Rosa-Salas, the pieces of jewelry are often so much more than just that; and the way they function socially as a tie to a specific culture and assertion of individuality is richly complex. But, as Rosa-Salas and frequent collaborator Isabel Flower will tell you, a search for the history of nameplate jewelry won’t turn up many stories like Rosa-Salas’ that contextualize its significance and genealogy. Instead, it mostly turns up references to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Sex and the City character, Carrie Bradshaw, who famously wore a nameplate on the show after Parker’s stylist saw "kids in the neighborhood" around her New York City shop sporting the style and decided to put one the iconic white TV character.
Today, many refer to nameplates as "Carrie necklaces" and consider the show an origin point for the style becoming popular despite it actually dating back much, much further. "It’s not that the history doesn’t exist," says Rosa-Sales, "but it hasn’t been canonized by academia in a way that validates it as a cultural product worthy of study."
In an attempt to begin filling that gap, Rosa-Salas (an NYU doctoral student in cultural anthropology) and Flower (a photographer, writer, and former Art Forum editor) started #DocumentingTheNameplate, a project that uses oral history methods to piece together the origins and evolving cultural significance of the style.The project began in 2015 when Flower and Rosa-Salas launched the podcast they currently cohost for Top Rank magazine with an episode on nameplates (highly recommended), after having bonded over their mutual affection for the adornments. (Flower grew up mostly in New Jersey and also has a Myers-Briggs ring and hoops that say "exclusive," among other pieces.) Then, in 2017, they co-wrote the academic journal essay Say My Name: Nameplate Jewelry and the Politics of Taste.
The duo's essay and podcast episode both dig into the ways in which nameplates can be used as a case study to understand how race and class intersect to shape notions of taste; for instance, why in some contexts the jewelry is considered "cool" and in others considered "tacky." They also go into how wearing a nameplate can be considered an act of "taking up space" for working-class people of color. "On the most personal level, wearing one’s name opposes the homogenization and cultural illegibility experienced by immigrants, low-income groups, and communities of color in the United States by making hypervisible the wearer’s unique identity," they write in the essay.
Plus, they point out how the enduring idea that Sarah Jessica Parker popularized the style perfectly exemplifies how upper-class white people are the gatekeepers of "the mainstream." "In our writings and our studies, we were pleasantly surprised at how the nameplate is a really interesting theoretical vessel for looking at a lot of these larger cultural systems or structural mechanisms in place for how information moves around or how it becomes legitimate or not," says Flower.
