Asheville opens first permanent U.S. museum dedicated to costume jewelry

At 60 Haywood St., costume jewelry finally got the museum treatment it has always deserved. Asheville’s Museum of Costume Jewelry opened as the first permanent U.S. institution devoted to the form, with 750 pieces spread across 31 exhibits that trace the medium from Art Nouveau to contemporary design.

That range matters because costume jewelry has never been a lesser story told in lesser materials. In the museum’s galleries, carved horn from the Art Nouveau period sits alongside Art Deco necklaces by Jakob Bengel in chrome and bakelite, a pairing that makes the argument clearly: design history does not stop at precious stones. These pieces show how makers used industrial materials, new finishes, and bold silhouettes to capture the pace of modern life, turning adornment into a record of changing taste, technology, and aspiration.

The museum’s collection reaches beyond Europe and the United States and names Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Miriam Haskell, and Christian Dior among the figures represented. It also holds objects linked to Josephine Baker and Katharine Hepburn, two women whose public images helped define the drama and polish of 20th-century style. That context gives the collection its charge. A strand, clasp, or chromed surface can carry as much cultural weight as a diamond if it speaks to the era that shaped it.

Sharon Ryback, the museum’s founder, said the concept grew out of a visit to the Purse and Handbag Museum in Amsterdam, and that leap is easy to understand. Both accessories and costume jewelry sit at the point where craft meets identity, where fashion becomes personal theater. The museum’s mission is to collect, preserve, research, and exhibit 20th-century and contemporary costume jewelry, and its vision extends that mandate into a learning center, rotating special exhibits, lectures, outreach programs, and school partnerships.

The institution is open in Asheville from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Wednesdays, and is housed at 60 Haywood St. It is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a library of more than 250 jewelry books and plans for guest lectures and volunteer docents. In opening this archive to the public, Asheville has done more than add a new attraction. It has granted costume jewelry its place in the canon, where materials, symbolism, and invention deserve to be read as carefully as carat weight.