How Kelly Klein Ended Up With Wallis Simpson’s Pearl Earrings

The funeral of Edward VIII would have been very different if 36 years earlier, after 325 days in office as king of the United Kingdom, he had not abdicated to his replacement. That would be his younger brother Albert, crowned as George VI. Meanwhile, Edward traded royalty for romance by marrying Wallis Simpson, an American who was still legally married to her second husband, Ernest Aldrich Simpson.

The brief closed-door funeral of the Duke of Windsor, a consolation title given to Edward VIII after his renunciation of the throne, took place on June 5, 1972, in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Immediately after burying her husband in the royal cemetery of Frogmore (as had been agreed by the deceased and his niece Elizabeth II), the widow returned home. Since 1952, the couple had resided at the Villa Windsor in Paris, where Edward VIII died less than a month before his 78th birthday.

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The Duchess of Windsor left dressed in the jet coat and dress in which she had attended the funeral, the same ones in which she had arrived in cold England on June 2, the day after her husband’s body landed aboard a military plane. She was enormously grateful to Hubert Givenchy for staying up all night to supervise the making of this deceptively simple outfit with matching pillbox headpiece and chiffon veil. Wallis is credited with saying, “I’m no big deal, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else.”

The haute couture designer confessed to the renowned fashion journalist Suzy Menkes in an interview published by Vogue that Simpson had complimented him when she received the finished look: “Hubert, it’s really wonderful.” He replied, “No, it’s normal; it’s my job.”

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Simpson said goodbye to her partner of nearly four decades with the original pair of Van Cleef & Arpels earrings she had been gifted by Lord Mountbatten. One is mounted in white gold and surrounded by 16 pear-cut diamonds and 32 brilliant-cut diamonds. The other, identical in shape, boasts a slate gray pearl. The Duke of Windsor, who liked to collaborate with Jeanne Toussaint of Cartier and René Sim Lacaze of Van Cleef & Arpels to add to his wife’s enviable jewelry collection, had given them to Simpson in 1958, a year after their creation.

Wallis paired her meaningful accessory with a necklace of 28 thick natural pearls and a diamond clasp, signed by Cartier, that had belonged to the duke’s mother, Queen Mary. From a second strand hung a natural pearl with a diamond cap, suspended from a horseshoe-shaped structure.

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Nearly 15 years after Simpson wore the pearl earrings to her husband’s funeral, they fell into the hands of another headline-making couple. Simpson died on April 24, 1986, and some of her possessions were auctioned off by Sotheby’s in Geneva.

Enter Calvin Klein, creator of the first designer jeans. Klein purchased the earrings, necklace, and a pearl pendant for his second wife, photographer Kelly Klein, totaling $1.18 million. Kelly later debuted the pieces to attend the 1989 Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Awards. In 2007, 20 years after acquiring the pieces, the now divorced Klein couple put the pieces up for sale at another Sotheby’s auction.

“The first time I wore them, it created a lot of drama. I hadn’t realized just how much buzz there was surrounding these pearls,” Kelly told W magazine in 2007, calling a pearl “the ultimate feminine jewel.” She continued: “All evening long, people came up to me and asked, ‘Are those the pearls?’ It was quite a spectacle.”

The Windsor estate sale in 1987 raised $50.3 million—seven times the initial estimate. At the request of the duchess, the money was donated to the Pasteur Institute in Paris as a thank you to the French for their hospitality. The Kleins sold the earrings for $690,600, the necklace for $3,625,000, and the pendant for $505,000.

Originally published by Vanity Fair Spain.