Trifari Ballerina, Ciro copy or fake?
 

My quest started a couple of years ago when I was lucky enough to be able to buy a British 1953 Ciro catalogue. This contained a picture that I immediately identified as a Trifari ballerina design I had seen for sale and as a design patent, D148088, 1947. At first glance this picture seemed exactly the same as the patent and as I remembered the Trifari brooch, but there was no mention of it being a Trifari piece.
I later saw the design for sale marked Ciro and bought it, it is a wonderful purchase but I was surprised to discover that the face was a fake opal not the glass moonstone which Trifari was using on pieces of that time.

Having now got a Trifari ballerina and being able to compare the two actual pieces I am convinced that they were not made from the same mould and that they were not both made by Trifari, yet the Ciro piece is so closely similar that it seems it must have been intended to have been mistaken for the ‘real’ Trifari. This is perplexing as Trifari are well known for defending their designs against copying, the design patent was granted for 7 years in 1947 so it would still have been in force in 1953.

The only conclusions that I can come to are that either Trifari licensed the design to Ciro or that the time difference between fashion in the US and UK in the late 40s /early 50s allowed Ciro to have a hit with a design whose patent had almost expired and Trifari decided to let it go. Or perhaps it is both!
My thanks to Adrienne Shivers for reminding me that US patents provided no protection for designs in other countries, unlike now-a-days when we have international agreements in place, so Ciro could have made copies without Trifari being able to do anything about it.

I hope you enjoy comparing these, and the additional photographs on other pages, and coming to your own conclusions.

 

 CIRO                                                TRIFARI







                             

       CIRO                                               TRIFARI