Shanghai Scrap

I’m tied down on deadline today (breaking only for the inaugural meeting of the Shanghai Metals Club – more on that another time), but I would be seriously out of line if I didn’t alert folks to a couple of fascinating posts on the Chinese pearl industry over at Deep Glamour (Part I, here; Part II, here; interview with the author, here). They’re excerpted from Stephen Bloom’s new book, Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls. Below, an image taken in Zhuji, China’s pearl capitol, two years ago, by my friend Randy Goodman (a great non-ferrous scrap metal man).

Of the pearls extracted from these shells, Bloom writes:

The Chinese freshwaters were a breakthrough in the fashion marketplace. Fashion-conscious women around the world started wearing pearls that weren’t just white or cream-colored, and not always round. Stylish younger women gravitated to them. These pearls had four things going for them: they were colorful, they often weren’t symmetrical (the baroque shapes appealed to non-traditional pearl wearers), they had the legitimacy of being real pearls, and they were downright cheap when compared to traditional pearls. As their size got larger, the Chinese freshwaters readily turned into trendy fashion items, turning into accessories fashion-forward women in their twenties and thirties from Paris to São Paulo just had to have. It didn’t hurt that women like Meryl Streep, Jennifer Aniston, and eventually Michelle Obama started wearing them, too.

Back tomorrow with some questions for and about one of the more mysterious figures in the US Pavilion at Expo 2010 fiasco.