Post Modern Sterling Earrings

Here’s a convo I remember having with Martin O’Keefe in the 1990s: “We should totally buy up all of the good 1960s and 1970s stuff at the Salvation Army, put it in storage for 10 years and then open a store and make a million.”

It might not have gone down exactly like that, but that was the gist of it. I do remember at one point having an apartment full of mid-century stuff (and living off the sales of said stuff during one particularly dire bout of underemployment). I also learned that most dealers are not exactly millionaires.

But here we are, 15 years on, and had we stuck to the plan, we could have had a pretty nice nest egg. So I was thinking, what’s the next collectible? I mean there’s a retro-kitsch revival happening amongst the teens (just like how when I was a kid, cheap jewellery from the ’50s and ’60s was fun to wear). But what will stand out as the era-defining design of the ’80s and ’90s? In furniture, works by designers such as Tom Dixon, Ron Arad, Philipe Starck and Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group are already much sought after.

These earrings have a very late ’80s, early ’90s, minimalist vibe to me (brushed finishes, naive designs). If I hang onto them and then leave them to a great niece in my will, maybe it would be like if my grandmother had left me a deco piece from the 1920s.