October 5, 2020 | by Marcel Rosa-Salas, PhD

I grew up on a busy Brooklyn street, directly across from a jewelry store owned by a portly Italian American man everyone called Casale. It did not matter whether I was on my way to school or to the corner bodega, I was always drawn to stop and stare at the glimmering rows of nameplate pendants on display in Casale’s shop window. 

There was one in particular that always seized my attention and remains emblazoned in my memory: a pendant that spelled out the name “Maria” in a bubbly diamond-encrusted cursive. 

It was one of the first objects that I consciously remember perceiving to be beautiful. I have a twin sister and have spent most of my life being called by the wrong name. The idea of wearing my name for others to see was appealing for the dual function it offered: a stylish accessory that was both decadent yet deeply practical. 

Nameplate jewelry is a form of customized adornment in which names and/or words are worn as necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings and belt buckles. During my childhood and adolescence in New York City during the 1990s and early aughts, this jewelry was a cross-cultural stylistic staple of my community’s social fabric.

*Many of my Black, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Italian American and Middle Eastern peers received these items for a range of coming-of-age rites, including birthdays, communions, and graduations. Whether you were young or old, male, female or non-binary, poor, middle or working class, nameplates seemed to be an item that united a diverse urban populace through an accessory centered on identity. 

I received my first nameplate necklace at age 10, after writing my mother a letter proclaiming that my academic achievements proved me responsible enough to safeguard this rather expensive piece of gold jewelry. My parents purchased my first nameplate—a gold, single-plated brushed pendant with my name written in cursive and framed by hearts—at the Albee Square Mall on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Fulton Street is a historic site in the history of 20th century American fashion, as it was one of the innovation meccas of hip hop style, which has since been exported across the United States and around the world.

In my scholarship as a cultural anthropologist and marketing professor, I am drawn to the seemingly trivial and taken-for-granted elements of consumer culture that, upon closer examination, are marked with profound sociopolitical significance. Nameplates are one of these phenomena. In 2014, I, along with my collaborator Isabel Flower, began a research project called Documenting the Nameplate—a photography and digital storytelling endeavor that explores nameplate jewelry and the stories of people who cherish it. 

*Our research began from the realization that there was no formally recorded history about this tremendously popular style. Some jewelry historians we spoke with reasoned that this was because nameplate jewelry could not be considered “fine jewelry.” However, Isabel and I knew that given the fact that historiography is inherently political, nameplate jewlery’s erasure from written documentation was in fact revelatory of intersecting race, class and gender hierarchies that have shaped how this style has been disregarded by scholars, as well as in the public sphere. 

We decided that the best way to begin to tell the story of the nameplate’s rich heritage was to make this research a crowd-sourced endeavor. What first began as a podcast has since become an Instagram page and a forthcoming photography book. Documenting the Nameplate centers the first-person narratives of people from across the United States and the world who have contributed photographs and testimonies about the significance of nameplate jewelry in their life stories and family histories. We have collaborated with many photographers and have traveled across New York City, as well as to Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas to document nameplate jewelery’s myriad cultural manifestations. 

Our article for the Journal of Marketing Management’s special issue “Worth more than just its weight in gold: nameplate jewellery and the practice of oppositional respectability” draws on a sample of the narratives that we have received to discuss how some people wear this style as an act of micro-political resistance to the strictures of respectability politics. 

 Given the nameplate’s common association with low-income communities of color, several of our participants have commented on the ethnoracial and class bias that this style bears in corporate and academic spaces. Isabel and I have also experienced this maligning first hand.

Our article offers the insights from our ongoing historicization of nameplate jewelry, and connects this style to debates about the complex politics of identity, fashion and personhood. We found that nameplate jewelry can function for some wearers as an item they inscribe with multilayered significance, linking them to familial lineages, geographic space, and time. 

In addition to initiating an area of scholarly exploration into this immensely popular cultural touchstone, it is our hope that this research and our forthcoming book will add to efforts that seek to democratize knowledge production in a way that foregrounds subjectivity, collectivity, and non-linearity.  

• Read the article in The Journal of Marketing Management

• Follow Documenting The Nameplate on Instagram

• Listen to the Podcast

Dr. Marcel Rosa-Salas is an anthropologist of consumer culture from Brooklyn, NY who examines advertising’s role in creating racial ideas in America. She is currently an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Dr. Rosa – Salas is the co-editor of “Documenting the Nameplate,” a forthcoming book about nameplate jewelry culture, and co – host of the Top Rank Podcast. Prior to being an anthropologist, she was a culture marketer at Red Bull.