The term "Street Jewellery" denotes the enamelled-iron advertising signs in common use from the 1880's to the mid Twentieth Century. These signs reflected in their design, typography and textual content the social and economic atmosphere of that period.
The period was the cradle of our contemporary technological and industrial practice. Study of Street Jewellery therefore allows the student to appreciate in essence the marketing methods current then, which led to those prevailing now.
At the start of the Twenty-first Century we are used to being confronted by a huge range of advertising media, printed and broadcast. Advertising has become part of the fabric of everyday life; it is a sophisticated artform witnessed and appreciated more universally than any other.
All aspects of our lives are touched by advertising, and advertising embraces greedily all other artforms (painting, design, fashion, music, drama, opera, photography, film, printing, poetry and storytelling). Advertising often borrows directly from famous examples of other artforms for its own purposes.
In previous centuries advertising was more discreet and product specific, locally produced and directed, and limited in its vehicles of expression.
Street Jewellery is a paradigm of the emergence in the Nineteenth Century of the universality of advertising as we now know it.
This Web Site has been designed by the authors of the Hypermedia Product 'Street Jewellery'.
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Last update: 14 June 2010