CBH Talk | Mourning and Adorning: Woven Hair Jewelry and Victorian Mourning Traditions

Mourning jewelry – jewelry created to remember deceased loved ones – dates back to the Middle Ages, but its popularity in Western Europe reached a peak with Queen Victoria whose mourning customs following Prince Albert’s death were imitated throughout Britain and beyond. In addition to donning simple black clothing for the four decades between Albert’s death in 1861 and her own in 1902, Victoria codified many mourning habits and traditions, including wearing mourning jewelry.  

One style of jewelry Queen Victoria popularized used ornamentally woven locks of loved ones’ hair in rings, bracelets, brooches, necklaces and more. Other jewelry pieces used dark black materials, especially jet and onyx. The popularity of these pieces took firm hold in the 19th century and they remain coveted collector items today. 

Join us as we explore Victorian mourning traditions, the jewelry culture that emerged, and how these expressed themselves across the Atlantic. Three experts – Deborah Lutz, a scholar of Victorian material culture and literature; Anna Rasche a gemologist, jewelry historian and former dealer; and Gina Iacovelli, a contemporary jewelry designer who specializes in weaving hair into her pieces – talk about these tokens of love and loss. Led in conversation by CBH Chief Historian Dominique Jean-Louis, they’ll look at the mourning culture and jewelry that Queen Victoria inspired, and how a growing number of people are finding new meaning in such memory objects today. 

^{Images: Top row - items from CBH's collection. Bottom row - Deborah Lutz, Anna Rasche, Dominique Jean-Louis, Gina Iacovelli}

Following the Panel 

Jewelry designer Gina Iacovelli will lead an informal demonstration of ornamental hair weaving. In addition, illustrative jewelry from the Center for Brooklyn History collection, including items made of woven hair and French “jet”, will be on display.

Participants

Gina Iacovelli is the creative force behind Mementos Entwined, a jewelry brand that celebrates the profound nature of love while acknowledging the brevity of life. Drawing inspiration from sentimental and mourning customs of the 18th and 19th centuries, Iacovelli has dedicated the past ten years to studying the nearly forgotten art of weaving delicate strands of human hair into wearable keepsakes. Each braid she meticulously creates carries echoes of the voices of women from the Victorian Era. Their instructions and patterns, shared in ladies’ home journals and books, are what allowed her to revive this unique art form. Recently, her expertise in hairwork designs has led to a special collection of bespoke lockets, rings, and bracelets in collaboration with 2 skilled metal artists. Her mission is to illuminate the beauty and emotions encapsulated within these jewelry pieces and reintroduce them in contemporary fashion.

Dominique Jean-Louis, Ph.D is the Chief Historian of the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library. Previously, she held the position of Associate Curator of History Exhibitions at New-York Historical Society, where she co-curated Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow (2018), Our Composite Nation: Frederick Douglass' America (2022), and is the co-curator of Black Dolls (2022). She is a former Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in Museum Education at the Museum of the City of New York, where she also contributed to the flagship exhibition New York at Its Core (2016). She received her B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University, and her Ph.D in US History from New York University, with her doctoral research focusing on race, education, and immigration in post-Civil Rights Era Brooklyn. Dominique regularly writes and lectures on Blackness in America, schools and education, and New York City history.

Deborah Lutz is an expert and scholar of Victorian material culture and literature. She has written extensively on the history of hair jewelry and hair relics. She teaches Victorian literature and culture at the University of Louisville as the Thruston B. Morton Endowed Chair. Lutz is the author of five books, her sixth one, forthcoming in 2026, is a biography of Emily Brontë. A previous book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. Past honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Cabinet Magazine, and many other venues, and she is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions—Jane Eyre and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

 Anna Rasche is an author, gemologist, and jewelry historian who has previously worked in the jewelry collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has a Graduate Gemologist Degree from the Gemological Institute of America, and an MA in the History of Design & Curatorial Studies from Cooper Hewitt/Parsons. Her debut novel The Stone Witch of Florence is out October 8, 2024, and is based on medieval gem lore. For more information, visit annarasche.com.