RELEASED IN THE Summer of 2023, Documenting the Nameplate is a photographic celebration of nameplate jewelry and the vibrant culture behind them. Co-written by Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Attyah Flower, the book is a culmination of decades worth of original research, testimonies, and consulting with jewelry historians to create the most comprehensive record on the subject. “It's the culmination of pictures from parties, the DMs that we got, emails that we got, a podcast, an Instagram page, a google form,” Flower says. “It's essays that we commissioned, archival pictures that we got from photographers dating as far back to the 1980s. It's kind of like a scrapbook on something that’s both personal to us and to others all over the world.”

Withstanding the test of time, nameplates have prevailed as both a way to adorn and express oneself, and as anthropological and historical objects that tell and preserve the stories of entire cultures and geographical places. BRICK spoke to Rosa-Salas and Flower, as well as Oswaldo Israel Serrano Orellana, a jeweler who’s been working at the iconic Bargain Bazaar for over two decades, to piece together the making of this tribute to those who wear, make, and cherish the nameplate.

COMING OF AGE

Marcel Rosa-Salas: I grew up in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, which is quite bougie now, but in the '90s it was not—back then, it felt like a small town. I grew up across the street from a jewelry store that was owned by this short, rotund Sicilian guy that everyone called Casal. He had nameplates on display in the window. This shop was literally directly across from my bedroom window, so I could see these amulets glistening in the sun since I was a child and really, I think were the first objects that I, as a person, considered beautiful. And that had a really big impression on me. In kindergarten, there was a young girl, well, obviously, a classmate of mine named Estefania who had recently immigrated from the Dominican Republic. She came to the first day of school wearing a double-plated nameplate that was framed by her baby teeth—two of her baby teeth, made into gold-plated pendants that she wore with pride around her name. It made a real impression on me.

I guess I've learned a lot of the penchant for documentation, saving ephemera from random parts of your life from my mother. She’s saved a lot of the letters I wrote to her when I was a kid, including the one letter that detailed my plea, essentially, to my mom that I was responsible enough and worthy of a nameplate because I was a good student. Every Christmas, I waited under the tree for it. It definitely was something that I coveted for a long time—as a piece of gold jewelry that is expensive, it's daunting to give a 10-year-old something like that. I guess my letter was convincing enough because my parents agreed. And I still have the nameplate to this day. I've framed it now though, so it's hanging up in my living room. It signified that I was perceived as responsible and mature, and able to protect and understand the significance of something that's expensive, essentially.

Isabel Attyah Flower: I think Freud once said that happiness is the fulfillment of childhood fantasy. Definitely seems accurate. I feel like, coming into early adulthood, being out of school, you get to add the things to your life that you always wanted, but could never have as a child. It's that moment of self-construction and world-making, where you get to be an adult for the first time. I feel like having my nameplate was a big part of that for me, and it definitely felt symbolic to have bought it with my own money that I worked for.

I didn't grow up in a context where my parents were very... They're pretty frugal. They didn't really get me extravagant gifts or anything like that. I know my dad had a nameplate bracelet that he was gifted by his mom when he was a baby. It's almost like a dog tag, like a thin gold band with your name engraved. I never had anything like that. The only jewelry I had growing up that was real jewelry was Catholic saint pendants and crosses and stuff like that. I always wanted a nameplate because they were a huge part of pop culture in the '90s and they were also a prized possession amongst just other kids and teenagers who I saw. Even though I lived in a bunch of places and went to a lot of different schools, nameplates were something that was always consistently very popular among all different kinds of demographics or, I'd say, different groups of people.

I got my first nameplate when I was a kid from one of those jewelry kiosks in the middle of a mall. The mall was Park City Center in Pennsylvania, and it was one of those order-and-then-come-back-in-an-hour-and-pick-it-up ones. It wasn't made out of real gold or silver, so it tarnished eventually. So after a while it wasn't really wearable because it just oxidized. I got my first actual gold nameplate from Bargain Bazaar in Brooklyn when I was in my early twenties. That was a big moment to finally be able to get one for myself, because they're pretty expensive. I actually lost that one and had it remade, but I've been wearing that object ever since.

THE STORIES

MRS: One of the most memorable stories for me, or at least one that I remember reading for the first time and being really emotionally impacted by, was this story that I think we received by Google form.

This woman from Minnesota reached out to us with a story about the nameplate earrings that she had made from melted down scrap gold that her mom would find in people's pockets at the laundromat that she worked at. That was a lot of, I guess, luck and persistence creating this collection and being resourceful enough to collect it and save it. There was one person who wrote to us and talked about how the first design that came back to her was not something that she wanted and liked. Advocating for herself with the jeweler and saying, "Hey, I want something else," was one of her first memories of asserting her wants and her point of view. I just loved how the nameplate and the process of designing it was, for her, also an act of expressing her agency and self.

IAF: One of my favorite stories was from a girl in San Gabriel Valley or the San Fernando Valley who just wrote us a DM, pretty much describing how one day she was in Downtown LA with her mom, and her mom, out of nowhere was like, "Okay, are you ready to get your nameplate?" She was so surprised because it had never been offered before and she was so excited. And they went into this store that had door knockers and all these different types of gold and she ordered this nameplate. And then because she was too young to drive, even though the nameplate was ready the next day, she had to wait six extra days to get a ride from her mom to pick it up.

The way she described waiting to get the ride because she was so excited and she talked about how she was dreaming about getting the necklace and wearing it just really brought me back to being an adolescent and how self-styling was just so important when you're that age because it's your only way of communicating with the world. It reminded me of how crazy I would get when I was going to get a new pair of sneakers or something like that and how amazing it was.

Another one I was thinking about recently that always cracks me up is from someone who’d gotten a nameplate bracelet when they were a kid, and their parents had soldered it onto their wrist so that it couldn't come off. And that is funny to me. Marcel and I both are mothers now. We've had children in the process of this project, which is another interesting element because we've had a chance to name people and get them nameplates and stuff like that. But I totally get that as a parent. I'm like, "That makes sense that you would need to solder a bracelet onto a child's wrist." But that one is so funny too because then I guess as she grew, it had to be stretched.

THE CITY

MRS: In 2015, we just decided to take a walk on Fulton Street and see who would talk to us. Fulton Mall is also near where I grew up, and is a really important cultural site for hip-hop fashion—the Albee Square Mall especially, that has been memorialized in songs. The Bargain Bazaar was the only store on Fulton Street that said yes to us interviewing them for our podcast. They're at the very end of the street. Most of our research was based at Bargain Bazaar because aside from being just really important in the history, they were also just amazing research partners for us, and really offered us a look into the process, the culture of artistry and the craft, and allowed us to document their archive. That was unprecedented access that was vital to the book being made in the first place.

There’s the Diamond District in Manhattan that, depending on what your budget is, can be other places where people go. There's places in Chinatown, Fordham Road, and the Coliseum Shopping Center in Queens. I feel like every New York City neighborhood, for the most part, has its shopping center area that has nameplate makers. I feel like depending on who you talk to and where they came of age, where they grew up, they'll have a spot to turn to. The spots in Downtown Manhattan have gained popularity with certain celebrities and fashion people. I honestly don't remember their names, if Isabel would know of them.

IAF: Every neighborhood—and when I say New York neighborhood, that includes even a cluster of blocks—has a pawn shop or a jeweler that makes nameplates because it's such an important, I think, part of a neighborhood footprint to have that person. I feel like there's a tendency, especially on Instagram, to give extra attention to these trending celebrity jewelers, but I feel like what we've learned from our research and which I just continue to relearn, I recently moved to the Bronx, is there are incredible jewelers just all over the place. I recently discovered a new store, it's called Vincent's Jewelry, it's on 167th St and Jerome, and it has some of the coolest nameplate designs I've ever seen. On Canal Street, there’s New Top Jewelry that’s owned by Jane, Popular Jewelry on Canal, and then Ora Latino, the jeweler there is Tommy. These are all people who also have Instagram followings and people who come from out of town will go there to get jewelry made.

On Fordham Road, probably the most famous store there is called Lucky Jewelry. It's similarly as old as Bargain Bazaar, I think, from the early '90s or even the late '80s. 149 St and Third Avenue in the Bronx is another hub, kind of like Albee Square Mall, but has a lot of jewelers and similar type shops. Palm Jewelers on Church Avenue, in Flatbush.

When I visited Liberty Avenue on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, it was so crazy because they had all these... There's this one type of nameplate with an acrylic or onyx back where a thin piece of gold is on top of the plastic. And there were all these stores that had these styles I had never seen before. Dangling vertical earrings where the name is set vertically in block capitals, so you have a rectangular piece of plastic with these capital vertical letters. I have never seen earrings like that at any other store. I feel like there's really just endless super-local creativity, which is very cool.

I am really never tired of discovering a new jewelry store. I feel like Marcel and I could genuinely spend the rest of our lives going to jewelry stores in New York and wouldn't run out of places that make nameplates, and that all have an interesting signature in some ways.

FINE JEWELRY

MRS: When we started this project, we were really surprised—given nameplates are such a popular global fashion phenomenon—that before the journal article or the podcast we worked on, there wasn't really any academic research on the subject. Isabel and I were almost like, "This can't be the case. How could something so popular not be talked about, theorized about?" It's part of the art conversation, the popular cultural scholarship conversation. So that was one big motivator for us, to realize it was low-hanging fruit, aside from it just being something that we personally cherish and were fascinated by.

And of course, that gap in prior research was exciting, but it was also a bit daunting, because we had to figure out where to start and who to talk to. Some of the first people we chose to talk to were our peers, our family, our friends, the wearers and the owners of these pieces who could contribute that first-person perspective and knowledge and expertise that's contextual and grounded in place and memory, which, for Isabel and I, are extremely important, and forms of expertise and knowledge that we venerate and think that, especially with objects as personal as nameplates, are a crucial part to any type of cultural history about them.

We contacted a couple of jewelry historians who were very quick to tell us that of course there isn't scholarship about nameplates because they're not fine jewelry. Which, for us, was a very loaded and coded statement because technically, by the terms of fine jewelry, whatever, scholarship or industry, nameplates are made of fine metals. They often have precious metals. They often have stones and things like that. So they certainly can be part of that conversation. But of course, they're a style of jewelry that, in our culture today, are often associated with lower-income people of color. If someone already has an assumption that the cultural production and ideas produced by marginalized people are less valuable, less important, and less worthy of being historicized, then of course nameplates aren't going to be seen as worthy of documentation.

I think Isabel and I, our desire isn't to prove that they are, in any way. We're not trying to prove to fine jewelry scholars or collectors that nameplates are worthy. We're not seeking that approval, and we don't think nameplates need it. But I think it was more of our political interests, I would say, to want to unpack and explore and reveal the types of biases that popped up in those types of aesthetic judgments of nameplates.

IAF: Having people tell us that they were not fine jewelry was also really strange because, one, they are fine jewelry in the sense of technically, fine jewelry being jewelry made from precious metals or precious stones, which they have been made out of gold, platinum, white gold, diamonds for literally over hundreds of years. Even thinking about, in the book, there's the picture of the nameplate from the Titanic. That nameplate was made out of rose gold with diamonds. So you can't really say they're not fine jewelry, but I think that it's interesting that also, fine jewelry providers or brands that maybe jewelry historians associate with what they're talking about when they say those words, do also make jewelry that has names on it, it's just that those things don't look like the nameplates that we're talking about. You can get a tiny little bar with your name at Tiffany's or various other jewelry providers that are super minimalist and don't have the aesthetic tradition of the type of nameplates that we're talking about that come more from a lineage of hip hop. That, I thought, was also weird because a nameplate is a pretty simple concept, to have your name as a piece of jewelry. There's a lot of interpretations of that.

What’s also strange is that nameplates are insanely popular right now, as part of a general kind of '90s retromania. Although we always say nameplates never went out of fashion for a lot of people who wear them. Just because they're having a pop-cultural moment doesn't mean that they went out of style for other people, but-... either way, they are insanely popular and probably more accessible than ever because you can order them online from so many different places. We're not trying to convince people like, "Hey, you should like these," or, "These are beautiful" or something. It's more like, "Hey, if you think this is cool, what you clearly already do, maybe you could think about it this way."

OSWALDO SERRANO ORELLANA

JEWELER AT BARGAIN BAZAAR

IN ECUADOR, WHERE I was born, I grew up watching my grandpa and my father work in the gold business for a long time. My grandfather and my father bought a mine sometime in the 1970s, 1980s. We used to collect gold from the mines. I remember they’d dig into the soil, they used to collect gold in the rivers. It started out with just collecting gold in the beginning—collecting gold, collecting gold, and selling it. My father and my uncle were the ones who started to work with the gold to make earrings, to make bracelets. My uncle used to draw pictures for us, and has a background in painting. He was the one who taught us how to draw designs nice and clear. This is something we’ve learned from each other in the family.

I remember watching them put it in the fire, take it out, bang on it and make a lot of noise. So you could say that the work I do as a jeweler is sort of like continuing a tradition… The moment I came to this country, actually, I came into this kind of business. In February of 2000, I started working at a jewelry shop here. We used to make pictures by hand, drawing the pictures by hand, and then pass the design to another jeweler to cut. Then after that, we have to make the design, polish it, and then finish it. It used to take so much time—listen, making a design used to take me at least 10, 15 minutes to draw, each name. To make one nameplate. It used to take like, an hour and 20 minutes from the beginning to the end.

All my family knows is this kind of business—I have around 20 relatives who have stores and work as jewelers. What we used to do is more like “art,” back home, but here, there’s more focus on the “production,” it feels more like a business, like a factory. Starting out, I made small pieces like plates, rings. All with my hands. With the technology now, things are a little faster. We can make designs on a computer.  With the technology, we just type the name and 30 seconds, 50 seconds it’s done. Then to cut, it takes maybe 10, 15 minutes. An employee can have a nameplate done in 30 minutes or less. The time is cut by more than half.






In some ways, we are the last generation who's working in this kind of business. It makes me sad in a way that the tradition may end. My kids, they don't want to be in this business. They tell us it's too much work. It's too heavy. You have to have too much patience. So they don't want to do it.They’re more interested in technology, they want to be teachers, lawyers, they want to do completely different things living here.

Nameplates used to be way more popular, in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. They’ve sort of gotten more popular again now that there are new technologies and designs. Right now, as we speak, I have about 20 nameplates to work on today. My favorite pieces are the ones where you have to set in diamonds. In the 2000s, we started to work with many people who wanted these pieces, that were in the music industry. Don Omar, Daddy Yankee, we made pieces for those guys. I’ve made pieces for the boxer boxing guy too. Lennox Lewis.

I am really passionate about this kind of work. I like to have the taste of everything. My passion is to make the customer happy. I want to see their faces when they get the product. That’s what keeps me working. It’s not just about the money. It’s about making something that can be an important part of the person wearing the jewelry. Something they can wear forever, something that has some meaning to them. It’s an investment that’s well worth it. ︎