I Love Lucite

Before we begin, I have to admit that I can’t take credit for the above title. For those of you who, like me, were glued to the adventures of the cast of ‘Friends’ throughout the mid-90s and beyond, the phrase will no doubt sound familiar. This is because it’s the name of one of the shops that Joey finds listed on his ginormous credit card statement after he gets fired from Days of Our Lives (or falls down an elevator shaft, as it were). Remember when Friends was funny? I do. Makes me feel about a million years old.

Nonetheless, I do have a whole lotta love for lucite. Why?

Well, during the reign of Bakelite as the trash-jewellery material of choice, designers faced a major hurdle. There was (is) no such thing as clear Bakelite. To find a suchlike material, they needed to develop a material that mimicked the properties of glass, but was more flexible and therefore longer lasting.

The answer, needless to say, was lucite.

Lucite, for the uninitiated, is a form of plastic (an acrylic) that resembles glass. Prototypes of this material were being developed throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until 1936, three years after German chemist Otto Rohm patented and registered a substance known as ‘plexiglas’ that acrylic plastic became commercially available and began to be used in the myriad ways we know and love today. 

For vintage lovers, the main uses of lucite are jewellery and handbags. It was used in a number of other ways - as transparent shoe-heels, for example – but these are the two areas where you’re most likely to see things appearing on the secondary market.

In terms of handbags, lucite was used to produce hard, box-shaped handbags, often with a colour marbled through the plastic to give a semi-opaque/pearlised finish. These bags are now real collectors items, so be prepared to pay a couple of hundy for a particularly nice example.

Jewellery is a whole other matter. From junky 30s brooches with an object (an image, a flower etc) embedded in a lucite rectangle or diamond which are still relatively cheap, to large costume brooches that are either entirely clear or painted on the back to give a muted-colour effect, the range in style, quality and price is huge. I have a huge lucite flamingo which I love (late 40s – 50s).

The thing about lucite jewellery is that is doesn’t have the collectability of bakelite…yet. While people are coughing up hundreds for bakelite, lucite is still, in many cases, flying under the radar – given that ‘plexiglas’ et al are still used today, this material doesn’t yet have the nostalgic feel of bakelite pieces, though it’s of a similar vintage.

So if you dig on early plastic but find that you’re priced out of bakelite, why not try a little lucite? It’s cheap (relatively, some are around the $30 mark, and my flamingo was about $90 but it’s a good example of the style and i shudder to think what a bakelite equivalent would have cost), charming, and at least as ridiculous as that huge white dog Joey bought in Friends.
 
 What’s not to love?

Any lucite fans/haters out there? I think I’ve just talked myself into an ebaying-lucite fest.