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Chokers have wound around human necks for thousands of years—symbols, always, of the delicate dance fashion enables between vulnerability and power. Whether worn by people in Western Africa or Egypt or Sumer, the adornments may have served similar purposes. As Yvonne Markowitz, the curator emerita of jewelry at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, told National Jeweler, “a lot of ancient jewelry is protective and amuletic.” People tended to concentrate their ornamentation, she noted, on the parts of the body that were thought to be in particular need of protection—the head, the wrists, the ankles, the throat—and believed those items to be infused with special powers. Necklaces, though, could also have a more practical purpose: Native Americans wore versions of chokers, often made of the bones of birds, to protect the jugular in battle.

As they were adopted by Europeans during the Enlightenment, chokers ceased to serve explicitly martial or protective roles—but retained some of the suggestions of danger that earlier versions had evoked. Worn by the upper classes (which is to say, by people who could afford jewelry)—and also, now, almost exclusively by women—they were simultaneously subtle and ostentatious. Unlike other necklaces, chokers were never in danger on being visually sacrificed to the competing adornments of a complicated dress. They stood out, announcing themselves (and the ostentatious jewels that composed them). The most famous portrait of Anne Boleyn portrays the fated queen wearing a long necklace of large pearls that she had fashioned into a choker. Hers featured a charm in the shape of a “B” that dangled over her clavicle, daringly and, in retrospect, ironically.

In an age in which execution sentences were often fulfilled via beheadings, chokers also summoned their ancient origins to suggest the dangers of life in “interesting times.” In the aftermath of the French revolution, women took to tying red ribbons around their necks in silent remembrance of those who had lost their lives to the guillotine. But the semantics quickly evolved: Soon, prostitutes were identifying themselves according to the black-ribboned versions of the same style. (See: Édouard Manet’s “Olympia.”) Degas gave his otherwise pastel-delicate ballerinas black ribbons that wrapped around their necks in a similar fashion, the loose ends fluttering as they moved; it remains a matter of debate, today, whether he intended their adornment as a commentary on the demands their art placed on the dancers, or whether he simply borrowed the fashion to emphasize the dancers’ long necks.

Whatever the ribbons meant, they had their match in bejeweled counterparts that, as Degas did his work, served once again as signifiers of their wearers’ upper-class status. (Not to mention of those wearers’ youth and youthful beauty: Slim is the neck, generally, that can successfully rock a choker.) Queen Victoria wore the style, even in her older age. Alexandra, her daughter-in-law, was thought to have favored a stacked version of it because of the layered necklaces’ ability to hide a scar on her neck. The trend trickled down, in the manner of the cerulean sweater, to women of slightly less lofty station.