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W hen the American athlete Noah Lyles recently sprinted his way to a gold medal in the 100-meter dash, he claimed his title as the world’s fastest man while sporting a chic, vintage choker necklace. The chunky chain-link piece that hugged his collar reflects a wider trend that’s been coalescing on runways, in street style and now at the 2024 Paris Olympics: the return of the collar-length choker necklace, often festooned with big jewels.
These types of necklaces have cropped up in collections over the years, but they haven’t always been easy to sell, says Frank Everett, Senior Vice President of Jewelry at Sotheby’s. Lately, Everett has seen success selling this particular style of necklace given its reemergence in the zeitgeist.
But the chunky choker necklace is hardly a new phenomenon. Chokers throughout history were thought to have defensive properties. The necklaces were a mainstay among ancient Egypt and in Sumerian communities, for instance, as protective accessories for the wearer’s neck. During Europe’s Black Death, some women wore chokers with pendants featuring the image of Saint Sebastian. The necklaces became a consistent presence during the French Revolution as well, albeit with a grim purpose: some sympathizers wore red ribbons around their neck as an homage to the Jacobins who’d been guillotined.
Chokers became more opulent around the late 19th century, when the likes of Alexandra, Princess of Wales, enjoyed donning necklaces with wide collars and flecked with diamonds. Around then, jewelers like Cartier often fashioned lead replicas of individual clients’ necks in order to then forge close-cropped chokers that would fit the wearer perfectly, writes The Wall Street Journal. Fashion is cyclical, and chokers are no exception: they came back in the ’90s, and in a sense, their return calls back to the present-day fascination with all things from that era.
These days, chokers aren’t seen as protective amulets as much as they were in centuries past. But these pieces, especially the chunkier, collar-length varieties, are sometimes still wielded as a form of sartorial armor. Understated and more striking designs alike can often act as the important linchpin of an entire outfit.
More recent trends call back to styles that emerged in the 1930s, particularly those by Parisian jeweler René Boivin. An especially iconic Boivin design, Day-Night necklaces feature a rigid gold collar. They have a shapeshifting quality to them, a subtle means of switching up the design depending on the occasion. “It’s got moving parts that reveal gemstones or cover them up during the day, so it looks just like plain metal during the day,” Everett says. “And then you move those for night.” Another trendy choker piece is a ’70s-era look from the Bvlgari offshoot Marina B, which features citrine, onyx and diamond tones set in gold.
Recently, Everett has been seeing more haute couture jewelers and brands, like Louis Vuitton and Boucheron, taking up the mantle by offering idiosyncratic, collar-length chokers. Some of Vuitton’s high jewelry pieces give off a trompe l’oeil feel, with rows of diamonds mimicking double-helix DNA structures. And Boucheron has been crafting collar chokers out of rock crystal, which gives these necklaces the appearance of being knitted out of wool or something equally tactile.
Everett theorizes that the cyclical ebbs and flows of fashion cycles are primarily driving the chunky collar choker trend right now. After a period of longer necklaces being in fashion, it follows that the pendulum would then swing entirely in the other direction. “It’s just the way hemlines go up and down,” he says. It’s the world of fashion: you have to keep moving on or revisiting in order to keep people interested.”
