YBA YoungBritishArtist Sculpture Jewelry Costume First US Exhibit NYC 2000-2001

In the early 2000 while French Jean-Paul Gautier remained the designer at his eponymous Parisian fashion house, a Paris-based haute-couture runway-accessory designer was commissioned by him to create this handmade decadent street-culture-inspired wire-hook earring with multiple tumbled semi-precious stones, gilt chain and cord, and multi-color sequins that suggest divergent international cultures. On both the front and back, an explosion of deconstructed couture-textile remnants...

Robert Goosens, the French haute-couture Chanel-favorite parurier who enjoyed reinterpreting ancient and antique styles of jewelry with rock crystal and faux stones, also collaborated with Madame Alix Gres. Relevant to this statement necklace, the Parisian theatrical-costume designer, who founded the French fashion-house Maison Gres, commissioned Goosens to make spiral-wire adornments for her couture gowns. This handmade hammered brass wire choker necklace with five dropped en-tremblant pendants is decorated with unique colorful beads and wrapped wire. The piece dates between 1969-1971 based on similar unsigned spiraled-wire metal jewelry without goldsmithing marks in the museum collection of TheMet (see our photo), which acquired it from Maison Givenchy founder Hubert de Givenchy, who was one of most supportive fans of Gres. Like the legendary sculptural clothing designs of Madame Gres, this necklace was inspired by Greco-Roman costumes, while its sculpted shapes by Goosens reference her signature curvilinear fabric techniques that earned her the sobriquet of "the master of the wrapped and draped dress". Goosens (1927-2016), nicknamed Monsieur Bijou, also made jewelry inspired by other periods of antiquity to compliment the couture clothing of Coco Chanel, Cristobal Balenciaga, Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent. After Goosens collaborated with Gres, he revisited golden spiral designs with Saint Laurent. Similar to the free-flowing fabric manipulated in Gres gowns, this hand-shaped necklace that we photographed in sunlight is a study in motion that drapes across a curvy cleavage. Adding drama to this necklace below its wire choker, the top teetering-wire pendant is a twisted and hammered horizontal double spiral, which is a Hellenistic symbol of life and transformation suggesting the breasts of a goddess of fertility and motherhood. Yet distinctly Goosens, 18 hand-cut and hand-dyed "ancient-Roman-blue" rock-crystal beads are wire-strung to weight a second tier of two separate vertical double-spiral pendants. On each, a wrapped-wire tube divides the blue beads. Between these vertical pendants in two tiers, the central vertical pendants each feature a one-of-a-kind multicolor bead (yellow/blue/red/black/white) in two lengths with abstract organic patterns recalling ancient Italian glasswork. Four more blue beads bracket these larger colorful beads. An additional 10 blue beads and 5 wire tubes decorate the bottom looped wire pendant, as well as the bottom of the wire choker. Like the hammered-wire jewelry designs of modern artist Alexander Calder, the creative complex construction of this necklace surprisingly required no metalsmith techniques, such as soldering or casting, just great skill with a jewelry pliers and hammer. For a bigger picture of couture clothing by Madame Gres during the decade beginning in 1969, she notably designed many museum-collected one-color silk-taffeta draped long gowns with empire waists and simple high collars or geometric cut-outs. Remarkably, the focal points for some of these unique dresses were at the wrists, from where long pouf sleeves voluminously droop around the hands to nearly the floor like two enormous long-petaled flowers. If paired with this equally downward-focused and balanced necklace from this same period, its bold Greco-Roman elements would have pulled a viewer's gaze of the dress from floor to face. Although there is no significant provenance for this necklace, hammered brass and tinted rock crystal were among the few materials repeatedly associated with Goosens from 1969-71. For example, in his overlapping interior-decor collections based on themes of waterlilies or foliage, Goosens hammered gilt brass wire and sheets (see our closeup photo) to represent plant parts or he wired rock-crystal beads to appear as tiny fruits. While the two multicolor glass or resin beads in this necklace are atypical, the combination of blue, yellow and red is a palette that the designer used for other pieces of rock-crystal jewelry and he created many kinds of multicolor faux stones with glass or resin paste, such as faux Tibetan turquoise including black and white. According to journalism based on interviews with Goosens, he often acquired unusual stones and glass for inspiration during his extensive travels exploring museum-collected antiquities. Since Maison Goosens was acquired in 2005 by Maison Chanel, it opened the Parisian showroom Galerie Goosens and associated shops to sell many kinds of reproductions and reimagined works by the founder, which fortunately does not suit the completely handmade elements of this necklace. So this couture piece remains one-of-a-kind. If desiring a vintage haute-couture original by Robert Goosens, we recommend perusing the Maison Goosens website so that a reproduction with a contemporary signature is not mistakenly purchased. Madame Gres (1903-1993) was born Germaine Emelie Krebs, but initially identified her fashion designs with the pseudonym Alix and later Alix Barton...

Acquired in The States and likely inspired by the American 1938-commissioned animated-feature movie, Pinocchio, that was produced for two years by Walt Disney based on an Italian children's story, this unsigned pre-WWII yellow-gold-gilt brass necklace with elegant draping chains features a three-inch-long playful kinetic multi-textured faux-carved-wood puppet-on-strings pendant with pointed hat, filigree-capped collar and waist, and flexible geometric-shaped limbs. Structured with three chains, notice the additional texture on the slightly larger links of the upper necklace. Unlike the movie, as the marionette on our necklace wears a lace-like collar resembling the original character illustrated by Enrico Mazzanti in the book by Tuscany-born Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), the necklace otherwise could date no earlier than the turn of the 19th Century when the spring-ring clasp was first in use. Since that time, Pinocchio became one of the most reimagined characters in literature based on multiple authors whose protagonist was a similar anthropomorphic puppet. To be conservative about its age as the necklace is in good condition, we suspect that Austrian-born Hattie Carnegie commissioned it to accessorize her "hat-to-hem" custom-made or ready-to-wear clothing that frequently featured amusing figural subjects with articulated parts, such as mythical creatures, fauna or clowns. Before her death at the age 69 in 1956, not all of the pieces in the costume-jewelry parures of her eponymous brand since 1919 were signed, while based on experience we assume that at least clip earrings accompanied this creative necklace...

This antique Surrealist sculpture set of two one-of-a-kind female figurines was handmade in hammered steel wire with patina estimated as early as the 1920s. Each ribald three-dimensional self-standing torso study of a woman features either three spiral springs (suggesting pregnant belly with large breasts...

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