Curator’s Corner

Another uncanny Wild Bryde lookalike recently came across my screen, in fact SO uncanny... as I looked closer, it became clear it was a knockoff, molded copy. Fascinatingly, though, this one was cast in 14k gold and selling for almost $600 - approximately 24x the current pricing of the real earrings. What is going on here?

Wild Bryde jewelry pieces often show up on resale sites with descriptions mentioning laser cutting, filigree or piercing, which are jewelry techniques that can create pieces in a similar style. However, Mike Warner's incredibly intricate designs were instead created through chemical etching of the brass, followed by planishing the surface for that faceted look. So, what exactly does that mean, and how do you tell the difference?

Guidance from the bench on identifying and safely cleaning heavy gold plated, rhodium plated, and solid sterling silver costume jewelry, without dulling planished facets or stripping delicate plated layers.

Collecting jewelry isn't about buying up every shiny object on the secondary market or following whatever trend is currently clogging up your feed. If you want to build a collection that actually means something to you - and stands the test of time - you need a strategy rooted in what you love, combined with a little bench-level practical sense. Using Wild Bryde as our playground, here is a simple, no-nonsense roadmap for how to start building a thoughtful jewelry collection from scratch.

From missing animal designs like okapis and leaf-cutter ants, to original species tags and rare counterfeits, here are the top items currently missing from the guide.

Have you ever found a vintage thrift find that just seems somehow wrong, compared to the rest of the line? In the 1990s, the arrival of zero-shrinkage liquid silicone RTV allowed trade copycats to pour cold molds over authentic finished jewelry and flood the market with cast 1:1 clones overnight.

I chose to intentionally excluse some styles of pieces from the census, to preserve the focus on the classic Wild Bryde style. In the 2010s and later, they experimented with the use of different techniques and materials, which ultimately produced quite a different aesthetic from the original approach.

"From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step" - Napoleon Bonaparte. Examining two of my personal favorite pieces, from wildly different ends of the Wild Bryde style spectrum.