Until recently, when a stylish young woman inherited her grandmother’s jewelry, she usually sent it straight to the auction house or to her bank vault. The period jewelry was deemed just too, well, dowdy.
No longer. Vintage jewelry has become a way young women express their individual styles. “Look at the new Gap campaign How Do You Wear It? with Sarah Jessica Parker,” says Rebecca Selva of New York’s Fred Leighton, a favorite haunt of fashionistas and starlets in search of period sparkle. “In one of the ads, she’s wearing a denim jacket with three diamond brooches, each from a different era.”
If there exists a new sense of playfulness to wearing vintage jewelry, there is also a growing sophistication. Museums exhibit it; auction houses sponsor lectures. Stylish young collectors like Parker, Cameron Diaz and Nicole Kidman hunt for jewels that dazzle more with style than carats. 
| VERDURA MALTESE cross cuff in peridot, blue topaz, diamond
and gold. $16,900 at Verdura
New York. |
This is why some of the hottest vintage jewels these days are the work of an idiosyncratic band of designers who plied their craft during the middle of the 20th century. Notable among them were Pierre Sterlé and Suzanne Belperron in Paris, and Fulco di Verdura, Jean Schlumberger and Seaman Schepps in New York. While their names might not ring the same bell as Cartier, Tiffany or Van Cleef & Arpels, this does not mean their names went unsung. The most discriminating women of fashion—socialites, aristocrats, movie stars—came knocking at their doors.
That is, until the 1960s, when rock collecting à la Liz Taylor came into vogue. By the glitzy 1980s, the names of these jewelers had largely been forgotten. Only the cognoscenti still valued their artistry, and terrific pieces could be picked up for less than $5,000. Then, in 1987, the Duchess of Windsor’s jewelry collection was put on the block. More than 2,500 people visited the auction. The mania to possess something that belonged to this legend sent prices for midcentury jewels into the stratosphere. A Belperron necklace of blue chalcedony, part of a suite custom-made for the duchess and estimated at $50,000, sold for an astounding $183,000. Collectors have since regained their composure, but prices have nonetheless entered a new realm. Of course, jewelry with a famous provenances occupies the highest echelons. That same Belperron necklace recently sold at auction for $119,500.
Auction houses refer to this mid-century period as “Retro” because it marked a return to a more baroque sensibility. Art Deco, the style that preceded it, was known for its flat, intricate geometric compositions of diamonds in platinum settings, often accented by rubies or emeralds. In contrast, Retro jewelry, especially the work from the late 1930s through the 1940s, is big and sculptural, flashing a colorful abundance of semiprecious stones and lavish swaths of gold—the switch in materials due in part to wartime austerity.
Nevertheless, Retro is really a catchall phrase that fails to do justice to the era’s many stylistic currents. In the 1950s, jewelers again began creating opulent pieces entirely from precious gems, as well as exploring texture through the carving of stones and the intricate weaving of gold into mesh, rope and tassels. While some Retro jewelry is abstract in form, expressive of a new machine-age dynamism, other pieces capture the essence of flora and fauna so uncannily that they seem to quiver with life. Or flutter and dart, as in the case of some pieces by Sterlé, who used birds and wings as favorite motifs. At Fred Leighton, a characteristic Sterlé brooch, circa 1955, of two stylized swirling wings with diamond brilliants looks so feathery it seems to float upon the wearer. It is priced at $22,500. New York’s Primavera Gallery has a standout example of Sterlé’s fascination with movement and texture: a shooting-comet brooch from the 1950s with a large peridot comet, streaming a gold foxtail chain. It sells for $28,000.
| | PIERRE STERLE'S comet with streaming gold foxtail chain and peridot at Primavera Gallery, New York. |
Some jewelry experts argue that Sterlé’s talent was at its most magnificent when designing diamond necklaces; their fluidity is unrivaled. Collectors have begun paying a premium for this artistry. A stunning Sterlé necklace, circa 1955, of a twisting cascade of diamonds and rubies sold last fall at a Sotheby’s auction for $238,000, more than twice its estimate.
Belperron’s highly organic and sensual forms are the ones most admired by connoisseurs. A woman in a man’s world, Belperron so prided herself on her singularity that she never signed her jewels. “My signature is my style,” she maintained. While she made gorgeous adornments out of precious stones, luminous, malleable chalcedony was the gem she most loved to design for. One lot at the October 2004 Christie’s auction of Fred Leighton’s private jewelry collection included the aforementioned Belperron suite of blue chalcedony pieces that had once belonged to the Duchess of Windsor. The ear clips, each a carved blue chalcedony leaf, with diamond veining and sapphire cabochons, had an auction estimate of $30,000 to $40,000. They sold for $54,970.
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