An Art Deco Treasure Trove
Bengel Costume Jewelry
By Christianne Weber-Stober¨
At the spectacular Exposition International des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925, four hundred jewelers and costume jewelry companies launched creations that were far from mainstream. The Deutsche Goldschmiedezeitung, Germany’s most important jewelry magazine, commented: “Suddenly, following the dictates of fashion, the most astonishing thing has happened: ladies with the most pampered tastes are wearing ‘fake jewels.’ Paris has created the faux jewelry fashion; London has promoted it and now it is spreading everywhere. The jewelry market is in the grip of a real costume jewelry craze ….” In 1928, the fashion designer Coco Chanel caused a sensation with glass jewelry, fake pearls and the statement: “With my new jewelry, a lady can be wearing a fortune that’s not worth a penny.” With a formal idiom and idiosyncratic materials all its own, costume jewelry — bijou fantaisie, Modeschmuck, gioielli fantasia — was at home in all languages.
In the 1920s, speed, the machine aesthetic and change for the sake of change were putting their mark on all aspects of life. In fine art, Cubism, Expressionism, New Objectivity and Suprematism were ascendant; architecture featured broken lines, rakish boldness and austere simplicity. The “new woman,” widely proclaimed by the illustrated magazines, was sporty, liberated and poised. She was encountered on the golf course and the tennis court as well as the ski slope and might even be seen driving her own car. Ladies bobbed their hair à la Josephine Baker and painted their lips sultry red. In the evenings, flappers danced the Charleston in bars and wore short tubular dresses, accessorized with the endlessly long ropes of beads immortalized in fashion-design history as the sautoir. Near the close of the 1920s, in this climate of liberation and embrace of the new, a trinket company in the small provincial German town of Idar-Oberstein, near the French border, began to produce what would become some of the most coveted and forward-looking costume jewelry of the Art Deco era.
The groundwork for many of the developments in design during the 1920s was laid at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919. It was the site of experimentation with chrome, nickel, glass and plastic; the cone, the circle, the parallelogram and the triangle were the central
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