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Throughout history, people have found it necessary to lasso themselves to their most essential possessions. A 5,300-year-old mummy uncovered in the Italian Alps in 1991 had a pouch attached to its belt containing flint, a drill, an awl and dried fungus. As early as 300AD, Roman women were tying ear scoops, nail picks and tweezers about their waists and 16th-century Japanese men knotted their seal cases, or inro, to their sashes, adding ornamental netsuke as counterweights.
Perhaps because they had freedom to travel, men’s household essentials have tended to be secreted away in the safety of concealed pockets. More housebound, women have kept theirs largely to hand and on display in hand-held reticules or purses, or worn on an equipage, a cord looped over the waistband or draped across the body.
The ultimate in wearable domestic tool kits emerged in the 19th century in the form of the chatelaine. The London magazine World of Fashion coined the term in 1828 to describe the newly voguish accessory, which usually came with a symbolic key, a nod to medieval chatelaines who had worn castle keys about their waists.
Most took the form of a medallion with a metal tongue behind to loop over a waistband, while in the US a more secure long brooch pin was used. A number of mass-produced, functional examples survive. These were worn around the house by working women, housekeepers and nurses. The incomplete and undated example in silver (pictured above) comprises a hare’s foot for applying rouge, a perforated ear spoon and a toothpick. The purpose of the heart and spade spoons is unknown.
The chatelaine became a reliable indicator of social status. Royals carried merely a watch, purse or fan on theirs, while lesser mortals could have up to a dozen more prosaic dangling attachments — pincushion ball, thimble holder, whistle, folding button hook, handkerchief purse, notebook, scissors.
The satirical magazine Punch imagined a version that would attach a woman to toddler, pram and dog as “a Real Blessing to Mothers”.
The chatelaine’s popularity lasted through the century, with high-end jewellers such as Boucheron and Tiffany creating extravagant examples. But today this once ubiquitous object is almost forgotten. No museum has a good selection and Genevieve Cummins’ sumptuous 1994 book Chatelaines — Utility to Glorious Extravagance is out of print.
Anyone prone to losing spectacles, scissors, tape measure — even their ear spoons — might feel a revival is overdue.
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