Ella Gafter 16mm South Sea Pearl Earrings

Even before Ella Gafter founded her namesake jewelry collection in 1982, she was a formidable presence in the jewelry industry.

As a Rome-based gem dealer, Gafter sold pearls and precious stones to retailers and jewelers but was often dissatisfied with how they made use of the rare materials she worked so hard to source. Instead of grousing, she decided to design jewels that would do them justice, focusing primarily on pearls — akoya, Tahitian and South Sea. She explains her fascination with the lustrous marine treasures simply: “Every woman looks better with pearls than without.”

Her daughter Talila Gafter, then an undergrad at Harvard, was her ally in getting the project off the ground. Together, they made the rounds to stores with Ella’s first efforts. “We had a little pouch with eight pieces and we sold everything,” Talila tells 1stDibs. After graduation, she “was involved one hundred percent” in building the company, whose pieces are handmade by master jewelers in Naples.

The designer insists that her unwavering focus is the source of her success. “There’s no compromising for me,” she says. She’s been known to replace the pearls in a single piece time after time until she’s certain she’s achieved her ideal result. “A pearl you have to respect,” she explains. “You have to put it where it wants to sit.”

Ella describes the collaboration with her daughter as a “partnership,” with each having her own domain. “I’m all fantasy; Talila is the concrete one,” she says. The company is now based in New York City, with Talila as its president while Ella is firmly at the helm of creative decisions. “I’ve never made a design suggestion to Ella,” says Talila. “Nobody does.”

That forbearance has been earned, says Talila. “I admire that Ella doesn’t take no for an answer, her tenacity, her extraordinary ambition. She believes as long as there is life, there is a lot of beauty to create. She’s a force of nature.”

Find Ella Gafter earrings, rings, necklaces and other jewelry on 1stDibs.

In the United States, ear piercing didn’t really become popular until the 1950s and ‘60s, but our desire for a dazzling pair of vintage earrings has deeper roots than that. In fact, wearing earrings actually goes back thousands of years, and you can find many tangible connections between now and then in how we continue to talk about these treasured accessories.

Women wore ornamental earrings — studs and hoops at the very least — in Ancient Egypt, which is home to mines that are among the earliest sources of emeralds in the world. Emerald earrings are highly prized today, and their quality lies in their rich, saturated color. The highest-quality emeralds are green or bluish-green. Earrings worn by the affluent in early Roman civilizations were set with precious stones such as diamonds and pearls, and a clean-looking pop of pearl on the front of the lobe is as timeless as ever. Hoop earrings are imbued with symbolism and cultural significance for many, and on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Ancient Near Eastern Art Gallery is a pair of simple gold hoops from Mesopotamia dating to between 2600 and 2500 B.C.

Today, ear piercing is very popular all over the world, and, as a result, it is difficult to overstate how much everyone pines for a good pair of earrings — modernist drop earrings, glamorous Victorian hoops, geometrically complex chandelier earrings, you name it. Sure, jewelry trends and the fashion darlings of social media come and go, but earrings have a staying power that seems impenetrable: The still-strong love affair between British royals and Cartier earrings is more than a century old, glossy 1970s hoops from legacy houses such as Bulgari and Van Cleef & Arpels remain the statement makers they’ve always been and although people have been stacking earrings for many moons, the allure of an expertly mismatched stack of charms and studs still feels fresh and new.

While there is no shortage of modern earring designs to choose from, the classics, like coral earrings, Art Deco–style earrings and diamond drop earrings are still heavy hitters. On 1stDibs, find a wide range of antique, new and vintage earrings today.