Luxury Bazaar Van Cleef

During the roaring ’20s, Paris saw a confluence of wealthy and creative people flock to the city from all over the world, like artists, writers, princes and singers. Designer Georges Mauboussin understood the vibrant and cosmopolitan spirit of the time, and at the jewelry house he would propel to fame, Mauboussin, he became an iconic creator of Art Deco jewelry, using jade, lapis lazuli, pearls and other precious materials imported from around the globe.

The Mauboussin brand owes its success to expertise with precious metals and gems and its illustrious clientele. The fine jewelry house, originally founded in Paris in 1827 as the Maison Noury, is known for being highly experimental with mountings for diamonds, finding inspiration in fields like aeronautics (Georges’s son Pierre Mauboussin got into the airplane engineering business in the late 1920s) and filing patents for many of its inventions.

This modern sensibility drew royal clients from the Middle East and Egypt (Queen Nazli owned several dazzling pieces), as well as Hollywood stars like Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin. However, its most significant royal relationship was with the stylish maharaja of Indore, Yashwant Rao Holkar II, who designated Mauboussin as his official purveyor in 1933. One of the maison’s legendary pieces for the maharaja is a necklace that uses two of the world’s most beautiful diamonds, the Indore Pears, part of the maharaja’s collection.

In its long history, Mauboussin has found creative and beautiful ways to incorporate the tastes of the time into its luxury jewelry, responding to movements like Cubism as well as crises like the Great Depression when it shifted to more affordable pieces that would be available to a larger audience. (From 1936 to 1953, Mauboussin also partnered with Trabert & Hoeffer to stay afloat following the Wall Street crash.) In the 1990s, the company expanded into perfume and watches. Galeries Lafayette acquired a majority stake in the company in 2019 with the jeweler continuing to showcase a dedication to its French heritage with an international approach to design.

Find a collection of vintage Mauboussin rings, necklaces and other jewelry on 1stDibs.

Rooted in centuries of history of adornment dating back to the ancient world, modern jewelry reimagines traditional techniques, forms and materials for expressive new pieces. As opposed to contemporary jewelry, which responds to the moment in which it was created, modern jewelry often describes designs from the 20th to 21st centuries that reflect movements and trends in visual culture.

Modern jewelry emerged from the 19th-century shift away from jewelry indicating rank or social status. The Industrial Revolution allowed machine-made jewelry using electric gold plating, metal alloys and imitation stones, making beautiful jewelry widely accessible. Although mass production deemphasized the materials of the jewelry, the vision of the designer remained important, something that would be furthered in the 1960s with what’s known as the “critique of preciousness.”

A design fair called the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes” brought global attention to the Art Deco style in 1925 and gathered a mix of jewelry artists alongside master jewelers like Van Cleef & Arpels, Mauboussin and Boucheron. Art Deco designs from Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels unconventionally mixed gemstones like placing rock crystals next to diamonds while borrowing motifs from eclectic sources including Asian lacquer and Persian carpets. Among Cartier’s foremost design preoccupations at the time were high-contrast color combinations and crisp, geometric forms and patterns. In the early 20th century, modernist jewelers like Margaret De Patta and artists such as Alexander Calder — who is better known for his kinetic sculptures than his provocative jewelry — explored sculptural metalwork in which geometric shapes and lines were preferred over elaborate ornamentation.

Many of the innovations in modern jewelry were propelled by women designers such as Wendy Ramshaw, who used paper to craft her accessories in the 1960s. During the 1970s, Elsa Peretti created day-to-night pieces for Tiffany & Co. while designers like Lea Stein experimented with layering plastic, a material that had been employed in jewelry since the mid-19th century and had expanded into Bakelite, acrylics and other unique materials.

Find a collection of modern watches, bracelets, engagement rings, necklaces, earrings and other jewelry on 1stDibs.

In the United States, ear piercing didn’t really become popular until the 1950s and ‘60s, but our desire for a dazzling pair of vintage earrings has deeper roots than that. In fact, wearing earrings actually goes back thousands of years, and you can find many tangible connections between now and then in how we continue to talk about these treasured accessories.

Women wore ornamental earrings — studs and hoops at the very least — in Ancient Egypt, which is home to mines that are among the earliest sources of emeralds in the world. Emerald earrings are highly prized today, and their quality lies in their rich, saturated color. The highest-quality emeralds are green or bluish-green. Earrings worn by the affluent in early Roman civilizations were set with precious stones such as diamonds and pearls, and a clean-looking pop of pearl on the front of the lobe is as timeless as ever. Hoop earrings are imbued with symbolism and cultural significance for many, and on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Ancient Near Eastern Art Gallery is a pair of simple gold hoops from Mesopotamia dating to between 2600 and 2500 B.C.

Today, ear piercing is very popular all over the world, and, as a result, it is difficult to overstate how much everyone pines for a good pair of earrings — modernist drop earrings, glamorous Victorian hoops, geometrically complex chandelier earrings, you name it. Sure, jewelry trends and the fashion darlings of social media come and go, but earrings have a staying power that seems impenetrable: The still-strong love affair between British royals and Cartier earrings is more than a century old, glossy 1970s hoops from legacy houses such as Bulgari and Van Cleef & Arpels remain the statement makers they’ve always been and although people have been stacking earrings for many moons, the allure of an expertly mismatched stack of charms and studs still feels fresh and new.

While there is no shortage of modern earring designs to choose from, the classics, like coral earrings, Art Deco–style earrings and diamond drop earrings are still heavy hitters. On 1stDibs, find a wide range of antique, new and vintage earrings today.