How to Wear It Best: Pairing the Right Necklace With Your Neckline
It has always amazed me that accessories, especially jewelry, can make or break an outfit. In fact, they can make or break my entire day. I don’t feel like I’m dressed without jewelry. No jewelry? May as well be naked; don’t leave the house. Even though I need jewelry to feel completely prepared to take on the day, not every bauble will complement every ensemble.
The idea of complementary jewelry pairings goes beyond color matching, metal mixing, and style consideration (seriously, who is going to wear a luscious Art Deco enamel piece with a crummy tshirt and jeans…I mean, besides me?). Some jewels are daily staples (like your diamond wedding ring, for example), but most are in a rotation, so to speak, that changes daily. Case in point: have you ever stopped to consider that the neckline of your shirt/top/dress should be your first consideration when choosing a necklace? Since I’m fairly confident you change your shirt daily, your necklace should be changing too.
When a bride chooses her gown, she often has a neckline in mind: straight strapless, halter, sweetheart, etc. These necklines determine how much skin is exposed and where the fabric will drape across the body. As such, each of these necklines carries with it a preferred partner-in-beauty. Today we’ll dive neck-deep (that’s a good one, I know) into pairing the perfect necklace with your dress’s neckline.
One of the wedding-gown standby necklines is, of course, the straight strapless. In this neckline, there are no sleeves or straps and the bodice is cut straight across the chest. There might be a slight bow or dip, but generally, it’s straight across. This neckline exposes a lot of skin and décolletage. A long strand necklace is totally wrong; it draws attention down and away from the chest and neck. A pendant seems like a drop in the bucket on the background of bare skin. A bib or collar necklace covers too much of what you’ve pointedly left bare. So what’s a bride to do? Chokers, darling. Choker. The beauty of a choker is that you are choosing a necklace that has enough bulk and heft to not get lost in the sea of skin that is your bare collarbone, but not so much that it distracts from your bodice and décolletage. A choker will draw the eye up, while the dress grounds it. If a choker isn’t your first choice in a necklace, you can choose a small bib (emphasis on small). It should rest just barely below your collarbone. This will still leave a good amount of skin covered up, but it won’t be as tight around your neck.
A sweetheart neckline is usually strapless, although not always. A sweetheart neckline features a sharp dip in the middle of the top line, forming a neckline that looks like the top of a heart (hence the name). Based on its similarity with the straight strapless neckline, one might be tempted to assign a sweetheart neckline a choker style necklace. But one would be wrong. Because the sweetheart neckline dips in the middle, it exposes just enough extra skin to make it read garish if it’s paired with a choker. A medium to large-sized pendant is the way to go with a sweetheart neckline. To add just a little more substance to the look, you can also go with a curved necklace whose width is proportionate to its height. The effort here is to allow the neckline to speak for itself. In order to give the dress its own voice, the skin bared by a sweetheart neckline needs to be tamed.
Another popular silhouette for a wedding dress is a halter. A halter neckline creates a plunging “V” shape. Deeper than a v-neck, a halter doesn’t leave a lot of room for a wide necklace. A longer pendant necklace is key here. The angular and crisp edges made by the halter look best when showcased with a sharp-ended pendant (think trillium- and marquis-cut diamonds). Too much roundness with a halter dress is going look off-kilter.
For high-necked gowns (which do have their place in modern matrimony, I assure you), a long necklace is the way to go. With so much attention at the neck already, there isn’t a reason to try to compete with that. A long strand necklace will draw the eye down, elongating the torso and making you look one hundred feet tall (in the best, willowy-model-on-the-runway way possible).
Once you have your dress, you can’t take a deadbeat bride vacation. You need to consider the rest of your wedding ensemble. The hair, headpiece, and most importantly: the jewelry. With this necklace guide, it will be a breeze. If you need some help and you live in the metro Detroit area, head out to Andre’s Fine Jewelers in downtown Brighton. The custom jewelers there will help you pair the perfect jewels with your dress. THEN you can take a wedding-planning vacation.
Neck-deep in necklaces,
Rebecca
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