“I am not a jewellery person”
I meet a lot of women at the store. I’ve always maintained that my interaction with each of these people is what fuels my design work. One of the phrases I hear quite often from many of the women who visit Rasvihar for the first time is something that helps explain what is also different about Rasvihar and it is this phrase that I’d like to talk about in this blog.
“I am not a jewellery person”.
So what does it mean when a lady tells me this? Does it mean that I am talking to a person who is least likely to enjoy buying and wearing Rasvihar jewellery? Actually it’s quite the contrary.
In India, jewellery was viewed more as ornamentation and not so much as accessorizing. It was sentimental or symbolic of a special occasion or of your status in life. This is what drove a lot of the jewellery designs that were created and sold. Buying jewellery in earlier generations also had a specific social relevance to occasions.
For many people, their exposure to jewellery is through their immediate family – namely mother, aunt or similarly close relative. Their first experiences of shopping for jewellery have been with older relatives and perhaps in typically traditional contexts. So for many women who don’t care much for ornamentation, the stance of “I am not a jewellery person” saves them a lot of time in looking at designs that they won’t use.
The social need for jewellery has changed over the last generation or so. And as far as spending money goes, gadgets and holidays and lifestyle experiences rank equally high on one’s list of things to do with money.
The concept of value and how we perceive it has also changed. Take the example of homes today – if one had to choose between a regular house and a high-style apartment, many would opt for the latter. It is simply because you only choose the option where you can visualize living your kind of life, expressing your kind of lifestyle.
So too it is with jewellery today.
So when someone walks in to Rasvihar and says “I am not a jewellery person”, I know she is really going to enjoy discovering what we have in store for her. When presented with a range of fine, hand crafted jewellery that is designed to complement a contemporary lifestyle, she finds this stance suddenly un-validated and she ends up stepping “out of character” to acquire many Rasvihar jewels. The reason is simple. Rasvihar exists to create jewels that blend beauty in form with relevance in function to suit contemporary lifestyles.
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