|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 26 September 2016, a Facebook user published the following status update and photograph reporting that his sister had captured an image of a Tiffany slave collar at an African-American history museum in DC (presumably a reference to the National Museum of African American History and Culture): The photograph had actually appeared on Facebook as early as May 2016 and was not taken by anyone in September 2016. Many social media interpreted the picture to mean that Tiffany & Co. had once manufactured high-end slave collars like the one seen in the museum display, but the text of the exhibit only stated that the design of Tiffany chokers was supposedly inspired by such collars: The text's final line lent a clue as to the image's origin: The Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Philadelphia (LWFSM), whose Facebook About page describes the facility thusly: We contacted the LWFSM, and curator Gwen Ragsdale confirmed that the exhibit was part of the museum's collection of artifacts from the slave trade. She maintained that the collar was a genuine slave collar from the 1700s, most likely a gift given to a slave owner to use decoratively on a female slave. She also noted that, like much of the history of slavery, tracking the precise provenance of the item was difficult due to a dearth of historical records, and much of the information retained about the practice was passed along orally across generations. The curator told us that photography was not permitted inside the LWFSM in part because it often leads to the spread of misinformation on social media. Indeed, despite the signage, the depicted brass female slave collar was not directly linked with Tiffany & Co. or the company's founder in the exhibit's text — the collar was simply referenced as inspiration for the jewelry brand's popular Tiffany heart. Determining the exact inspiration for any particular item of Tiffany & Co. jewelry is difficult, as it involves assigning motives and experiences to people who are not here to explain those aspects for themselves. However, the basic history of Tiffany & Co. is well documented given the prominence of the company in American jewelry design: Tiffany & Co. began as a stationery store but soon expanded to dominate the diamond market. And one historical connection with respect to the abolition of slavery can be found in the company's documented history of acting as an emporium of military supplies for the North during the Civil War. The collection's most popular heart-modeled items — the Elsa Peretti Open Heart and the iconic Return to Tiffany collection — were introduced in or around 1969. Early Tiffany & Co. pieces antedating those now popular items (based on two separate heart designs) bear no resemblance to modern silver necklaces, chokers, or bracelets. Early pieces attributed to the brand appear to have been be more focused on displaying precious gemstones, and no piece resembling a slave collar is present among the company's historical items. Tiffany & Co. maintains its own image repository of antique pieces, and no collar-like items appear among its archival collection of necklaces. All items resembling the choker are linked with post-1969 collections largely designed by Elsa Peretti and Paloma Picasso. In the 1800s, Tiffany & Co.'s primary precious metal works were household items such as silverware; items designed by Charles Lewis Tiffany weren't typically plain silver affairs, and all the antique chokers we located were gemstone-based. Although no direct link appears between Tiffany & Co.'s modern heart designs and slave chokers, company founder Charles Lewis Tiffany purportedly had links to the antebellum practice of slavery. A 2002 Hartford Courant article examined the iconic brand and its roots in the trade of a less precious material — cotton: The provenance of the viral Tiffany & Co. slave collar pictured above is certainly muddled. The image of the slave collar from the 1700s (of unknown origin) is from a real exhibit, albeit often misrepresented as depicting a piece on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. (rather than the Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Philadelphia). A curator explained that such items were supposedly often gifted to mistresses for use with their slaves but correctly noted that the history of slavery is often documented forensically in an absence of surviving written records, so little else is definitively known about the collar. The web site for Colonial Williamsburg reports that affluent Americans owners sometimes placed collars made of precious metal on their slaves as status symbols: According to the Smithsonian, slave collars made of iron were used to discipline and identify slaves who were considered risks of becoming runaways, but their pictured example looks significantly different than the museum piece shown above: Tiffany sent along a picture showing an object very much visually like the museum slave collar, this one identified as a sterling silver dog collar made by Tiffany circa 1884: The museum piece indeed bears resemblance to Tiffany & Co.'s Return to Tiffany collection, and discomfort with that visual likeness is one reason viewers have reacted negatively to the rumor positing a connection between the two. However, Tiffany & Co. pieces from the period of time Charles Lewis Tiffany headed the company (from 1837 until his death in 1902) tend to be based on expensive gemstones, diamonds, or silverware; the company didn't commonly adopt their now-iconic simple silver heart designs until around 1969. But Tiffany's core fortune (on which he built his empire) supposedly involved pre-Civil War cotton industry wealth likely derived in part from slave labor, a detail often elided from official histories of Tiffany & Co.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}