There are often accessories that characterise our styles, but also hint at our passions or professions, ending up defining us in unique ways: think about Nancy Cunard's bangles or Peggy Guggenheim's iconic sunglasses. French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, for example, used to wear a necklace made of chrome-covered copper balls.
"I had a street urchin's haircut and wore a necklace I made out of cheap chromed copper balls," Perriand recounted about it. "I called it my ball-bearings necklace, a symbol of my adherence to the twentieth-century machine age. I was proud that my jewelry didn't rival that of the Queen of England. I was labeled 'inhuman', an allusion to Marcel L'Herbier's film L'inhumaine, and was an easy target for Parisian street kids."
Perriand had asked an artisan with a workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to make the piece out of lightweight chrome steel balls strung together on a cord. The piece was inspired by Fernand Léger's still life "Le Mouvement à billes" (1926).
The necklace became a symbol of Perriand's passion for the mechanical age and a tribute to her fascination with airplanes and automobiles. It also came to define a period in her life: Perriand would wear the necklace while she was working at Le Corbusier's atelier in the Rue de Sèvres where she collaborated with other modernist architects, such as Pierre Jeanneret, Ernst Weissmann and Kunio Maekawa, and at the beginning of her research in metal furniture.
There are quite a few pictures of Perriand wearing the collier at work, while posing for a picture with her collaborators or reclining in the Chaise Longue Basculante (1928-29) she designed with Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier (this is an iconic image that came to define the modernist age View this photo).
The necklace was showcased at the exhibition "Bijoux Art Deco et Avant Garde" (2009) at the Musee Des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and was also included in the show "Charlotte Perriand 1903-99: From Photography to Interior Design" (2011) at the Petit Palais. LA-based modernist designer Sophie Buhai recently created a necklace inspired by this iconic piece, it is called - you guessed it - "Perriand" and it is available in gold or silver.
Jewellery designer Yael Sonia, a passionate fan of mathematics, geometry and physics, came up instead with a more literal interpretation of the ball bearings concept, and applied it to her perpetual motion pieces and in particular to her spinning wheel bracelets with Tahitian pearls or gemstones such as blue topaz spheres. In Sonia's pieces the dynamic movement of the pearls or gems are designed to accompany the movements of the wearer. As the spheres roll in their slot, they also create a unique rhythm that accompanies the wearer throughout their day.
Comments