Durban in October arrives thick with jacaranda and salt, and in halls attached to schools across the city and the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, someone is finalising what she will wear to the one dance her matric year has quietly been building towards. The search for matric dance pearls tends to start earlier than anyone admits, in a mother’s jewellery box, or in a small velvet case kept for exactly this evening. We have watched that particular kind of care for longer than Lullu has existed as a shop.

A matric dance asks a great deal of a wardrobe that, until that week, has mostly been school jerseys and hockey kit. The dress arrives first, after months of fittings. The pearls usually arrive last, and almost always on loan: a grandmother’s strand, a mother’s studs, the good box brought down from a high shelf for one evening only.

We think about this every October, when school WhatsApp groups fill with photographs of dresses and someone’s mother mentions, almost in passing, that the pearls have been set aside for weeks. A matric dance remains one of the few occasions in South African life still organised along old, unspoken lines. A proper dress. A photograph on the front step. A strand at the throat that belongs, technically, to someone older.

The trouble, if there is one, is what happens after. The dress goes into storage or is sold on to the next matric year. The pearls, more often than not, go back into the box they came from and are not seen again until another daughter needs them. We understand the impulse behind that. We simply do not agree with the ending.

Our founder is an old girl of Durban Girls’ College, on the Berea, and that is not incidental to how this house thinks. Durban Girls’ College and St Anne’s Diocesan College, out in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, are two of the schools whose matric dance season we have followed most closely over the years, not because either institution has ever stocked or endorsed a single Lullu piece, but because the ritual itself, the borrowed strand, the once-a-year pearls, is where this argument actually begins for us.

A school hall is not a boardroom or a wedding aisle, and yet it asks the same quiet question every November: what does a pearl mean if it is worn once and returned to the dark. We have come to think it should mean rather more than that.

Presence, in our view, is the better argument. A pearl earring worn to a matric dance in a Durban school hall and a pearl earring worn to the school run three years later are, in every sense that matters, the same earring doing the same work. It is only the calendar that treats them differently.

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The hall closes at midnight. The pearls do not.

We are not in the business of telling a matric-year mother what to buy for one Friday in the school term. We would rather talk to her about a first, proper pair of studs, simple enough to survive the matric photographs and every ordinary Tuesday afterwards, understated enough that nobody at the dance outshines her for the wrong reasons. Choosing that piece against a particular dress and neckline is the work of our matric dance jewellery guide.

The pieces our clients have chosen most, first studs among them, are gathered on one page. If your own matric dance season is approaching, in Durban, in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, or anywhere else the same ritual still holds, write to us. We are glad to help choose a first pair, or to restring a strand that has been waiting in a box since somebody else’s matric dance, so that it is ready for more than one night.