The necklace returns, it says

one of mine

For years on end you wander around oblivious to the fact that you are completely out of fashion. I have always been big on necklaces. They cast light up onto the face. They draw attention away from the hips. I have lots But apparently I was hopelessly out of date. I know this because they have just come back into fashion:

The neck was last a focal point during the mid-Eighties, when girls in pearls reigned and costume jewellery mostly comprised naff, paste baubles. The good news about the necklace's reincarnation is that there are plenty of avenues to be explored. After something bold, chunky and with a reassuringly noisy clunk? Well look to Lanvin, or at least Lanvin-inspired jewellery. At Balenciaga, gutsy, Dynasty-style, bling chokers replaced bags as what fashion folk like to call the “must-have accessory”, while at Givenchy, girls were laden down in threads of gold and silver chains.

Whatever you choose, the advantages of this trend are tenfold. With all this activity going on around your neck, no one is going to be checking out the ply-content of your cashmere poloneck, thereby obviating the need to fork out on lots of expensive clothes. And don't underestimate its power to utterly transform an outfit. Averyl Oates, the buying director of Harvey Nichols, points out that an oversize necklace is the best way of lifting all that black and the gothic mood that is prevalent this season.

If you are looking to buy something special, a great neck-piece makes a good investment, something that can be pulled out of the wardrobe year after year. Another point to consider is that costume jewellery is so well made and designed these days that it's often hard to tell the difference between something that came from Topshop and the designer, upwards-of-£600 variety.

Of course it would come back in style just as I start to experience crepiness.

Both cheap and ethical

You can't see it very well in this picture but above is a cuff in tiny checks. A larger photo which came to my email inbox shows it better but won't copy.

The cuff is from People Tree, the ethical fashion company. This is who made it:

There is a dark side to the jewellery industry: The cheap, spangled jewellery that is all over the high street is often made using child labour in India because it's cheaper and children's small hands are more suited to creating intricate jewellery. However a Delhi child labourer will be routinely forced to work 12 hour days, working, eating and sleeping in the same cramped, poorly lit and ill ventilated workshop.

Even though jewellery is major business in India it is difficult to form labour unions because it's usually created by small producer groups. This means that the producers are rarely able to bargain for a fair price and are at the mercy of a long chain of middlemen.

Tara (Trade Alternative Reform Action) defends the rights of the poor, employing only adults, offering them advance payments so they can buy materials, and giving them the security of long term contracts.

They run campaigns against child labour and have established sixteen schools and vocational training centres for children from poor families, which over 700 child labourers have attended to date.

Mosim, a jewellery maker from one of TARA's beading groups said she puts her money in a savings account, which she is saving to put towards her dowry. The project allows her to learn a professional skill, earn an income and spend time with people her own age in a country that rarely allows women to leave the home. Mosim even made her first visit to Delhi recently to participate in Tara's annual producer meeting.

You can support Tara's work by buying the unique jewellery created by Mosim and the other TARA artisans.

It is reduced from £10 to £7 in the People Tree sale, about the price of lunch at Pret a Manger.

Me and the emerald necklace

Laurel spray made for Empress Josephine

This is a piece I did for the Telegraph on the new jewellery gallery which is about to open at the V&A. I'm going to the private view next week - champagne, canapes and staring at tiaras. And where are you now, moths?

Chadour-Sampson takes out what looks like an ordinary plastic bag (though it's conservation-grade plastic) and opens it to reveal an emerald and diamond necklace and earrings: the Beauharnais emeralds, given by Napoleon to his adopted daughter, Stéphanie de Beauharnais, on her marriage in 1806 to the heir to the Grand Duke of Baden, and probably made by Nitot & Fils of Paris. It was about this time that jewellers began to develop open-back settings, which allowed more light through the stones. The simplicity of the setting, the square-cut and pendant emeralds surrounded by diamonds and connected by chains of diamonds and emeralds, must have been an early form of minimalism. Clasping it to my neck, I regret that I am not fit enough to make a run for it down the stone steps.

Cameos (the Victorian equivalent of keeping a picture of your loved one on your mobile phone), lockets containing strands of your nearest and dearest's hair (dead or alive) and jet mourning jewellery were all characteristics of 19th-century decorative jewellery, though it still incorporated religious motifs such as crosses. By the 1860s the trade had been transformed by mechanisation. Jewellery went mass-market with gold-plated base metals and machine-made chains, and was now worn by all classes. Inevitably, the simplicity of great - and easily copied - sets like the Beauharnais emeralds had to give way to jewels as works of art in themselves, such as a spectacular art-nouveau orchid of gold enamel, rubies and diamonds, designed to be worn in the hair, which has the slightly sinister fin-de-siècle decadence of the symbolist painters. At the turn of the last century the tiara became a fashion item, and no longer the preserve of royalty and aristocracy. Cartier was the leader in the making of tiaras, such as the piece made for Alexandra Comnène for her marriage in 1913 to Robert Everts, a diplomat, with cabochon rubies - early examples of synthetic stones, supplied by Comnène herself