Vicenzaoro Highlights, January 2024: Manuel Menini, The Storytelling of Vintage Jewels

Manuel Menini's Vincent Vintage Bijoux is located behind Porta Venezia in Milan, one of the city's liveliest and most cosmopolitan districts. An intimate store with a retro air where customers can “regress” to bygone eras by rummaging through vintage costume jewelry and antiques. The pieces on offer are the fruit of painstaking research among markets, antique stores and auctions and boast a workmanship and history that Manuel skillfully communicates through an amusing and ironic personal language, proving how the contemporary narrative of vintage jewelry is helping to make this particular niche market increasingly attractive, even among the younger generations. Last Saturday at the show, the collector and founder of the boutique explained in a one-to-one dialogue with Federica Frosini, Editor-in-Chief of the VO+ jewelry magazine. «In the past, vintage jewelry was appreciated and purchased exclusively by experts and collectors, now, however, we are witnessing a growth in interest on the part of new enthusiasts, even the very young. This is certainly thanks to fashion brands, such as Gucci, for example, which have increasingly approached vintage, but also to social media, through which the culture of vintage can be divulged in a more casual and light-hearted manner. While fairs, shows and exhibitions have long been the only “showcase” for this special world, nowadays, tools such as Instagram allow us to get closer to those who would never have thought of buying or collecting a piece of vintage jewelry. What wins over new fans is certainly the history of the piece and the values it represented in another era, but also the quality of its workmanship, the techniques with which it was made or the gems with which it is decorated. A quality that now belongs almost exclusively to high jewelry. Perhaps a unique characteristic of vintage jewelry is precisely the fact that it has taste and quality without necessarily being prohibitively expensive. In this way, it speaks to a very wide audience.»