Dress and Jewellery summary

Art-Jewellery has been used to complement may fashion collections and galleries such as London's Aurum have specialized in catwalk jewellery as there is a market for it. Shaun Leane's Silver Ribcage(Fig. 1) was used to complement Alexander McQueen's 1998 spring/summer collection.

The silver corset showed McQueen's fascination with memento mori.   Oxford Dictionary is Latin for remember that you must die but what it means is it is a reminder of inevitable death. Organic jewellery addresses life, growth and death the Silver Ribcage also reminds me of the vertebrae I found made a mould of and cast not so long ago (Fig. 3).

The silver spinal column and ribcage are larger than that of a human hand the spine curves on the end which suggests a tail. I find this piece fascinating as I have come across it before this paper when looking for inspiration for organic jewellery and I assumed it was an elaborate ring(Fig. 2) as the image I saw the piece was not on a model.

Figure 2- How I saw it as a ring

Figure 1 -Shaun Leane, Silver Ribcage

Figure 3- casted vertebra