Flame brooches
Creation details
- Creation year 1934
- Stone Diamond
- Material Platinum
- Usage Clip
- Dimensions 74 × 20 mm
Designed in 1934, the Flame brooches illustrate the creative ways of wearing a piece of jewelry seen in the 1930s and the multiple potential uses offered by a single piece.
The immense sobriety of their design—a simple curved line and strictly monochrome composition—enabled these brooches to play on the singular contrast between the pave-set brilliants of their middle section and the two rows of calibrated diamonds that border them.
Worn in a wide variety of ways
Their apparent simplicity of form enabled them to be worn in a multitude of ways. These brooches were frequently worn as a pair but could also be sported individually or as an uneven number forming a succession of curves on a jacket lapel, for example. They could also be used to adorn a hairstyle. In the 1930s, Hélène Arpels, the ambassadress of the Maison’s creations, was seen sporting Flame brooches in different ways on numerous occasions.
Asserting a personal style with jewelry
The notion of a piece of jewelry having various ways of being worn was not new in the first half of the twentieth century, but in the 1930s, it gave rise to renewed creativity, with the personality of the woman wearing it being taken into account. Social conventions, however, were not forgotten, and men and women’s wardrobes still observed certain rules according to different hours of the day or night. While meeting the imperatives inherited from previous centuries, the Flame brooches not only enabled the wearer to assert her personal style but also to follow new trends in fashion.
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