Ten designers, from Art Nouveau dreamers to studio rebels, who decided what the 20th century would wear.

Jewelry entered the 20th century as a display of carats and left it as a form of design. In 1900 the worth of a jewel was still measured by the size of its diamonds; a hundred years later a bent piece of brass wire by a famous hand could outsell a tiara. That reversal is the century’s great story, and it was written by a surprisingly small cast: an Art Nouveau glassmaker who put enamel above diamonds, a handful of Parisian iconoclasts who made gold witty again, sculptors who treated the body as a plinth, and studio jewelers who cut the connection to precious materials altogether. Along the way jewelry left the vault and moved closer to the skin, the street, and the museum.

The ten figures here were chosen for influence rather than fame, and for how completely each one is fused to a moment: Art Nouveau, Art Deco’s aftermath, midcentury modernism, the swinging sixties, the minimalist seventies. Together they span France, Italy, Britain, and the Americas, maisons and one-room workshops, and they include at least two names most readers will not know but should. They appear in no particular order, because a set this varied refuses to be ranked.

1. René Lalique

1860-1945

Lalique broke the tyranny of the diamond. He built jewels around horn, enamel, molded glass, and opal, materials chosen for poetry rather than price, and filled them with dragonflies, orchids, and unsettling female faces. His stand at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris made him the most talked-about jeweler alive, with Sarah Bernhardt among his champions and the collector Calouste Gulbenkian buying his boldest work. Start with the Dragonfly-woman corsage ornament of around 1897 to 1898, a gold, enamel, and chrysoprase hybrid creature now in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, still the defining object of Art Nouveau jewelry.

2. Jeanne Toussaint

The panther of Cartier

Toussaint never trained as a goldsmith, yet as director of Cartier’s fine jewelry from 1933 she shaped the house style more than any maker at the bench. Nicknamed La Panthère by Louis Cartier, she turned the big cat into the maison’s totem and gave postwar jewelry its confident, sculptural glamour. During the occupation of Paris she even designed a caged-bird brooch as a quiet act of defiance, releasing the bird from its cage at the liberation. Start with the 1948 panther brooch made for the Duchess of Windsor, a gold cat crouched on a massive cabochon emerald, the beginning of a dynasty that still prowls Cartier’s windows.

3. Suzanne Belperron

1900-1983

Belperron refused to sign her jewels, declaring that my style is my signature, and she was right: her swollen, sensuous volumes carved from blue chalcedony, rock crystal, and smoky quartz are unmistakable at ten paces. Trained at the house of Boivin before joining the dealer Bernard Herz in 1932, she made abstraction wearable decades before it was fashionable, and dressed Elsa Schiaparelli, Diana Vreeland, and the Duchess of Windsor. Her name faded after her death, then roared back when her chalcedony suite for the duchess appeared in the celebrated 1987 Windsor auction. Start with that blue chalcedony parure, cuff, ring, and brooch in one cool, cloudy stone.

4. Fulco di Verdura

The duke of Fifth Avenue

A Sicilian duke who ran out of inheritance, Verdura joined Coco Chanel in Paris and designed the enameled Maltese cross cuffs she wore for the rest of her life, one on each wrist. In September 1939, with backing from Cole Porter and Vincent Astor, he opened his own New York salon and proceeded to make fine jewelry witty: pinecones, seashells wrapped in gold and sapphires, hearts bound in ribbon. Against the era’s icy platinum and diamonds he championed warm yellow gold and color, a taste that dominated American jewelry for decades. Start with those Maltese cross cuffs, still made by the house that bears his name.

5. Alexander Calder

1898-1976

The inventor of the mobile was also, almost secretly, one of the century’s great jewelers, hammering out roughly 1,800 brooches, necklaces, and earrings from brass, silver, and steel wire. There are no gemstones and barely any gold, just spirals and coils that turned the wearer into a kinetic sculpture; Peggy Guggenheim, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Simone de Beauvoir all wore him. Calder proved that a jewel’s value could rest entirely on the idea and the hand, the founding principle of all later artist jewelry. Start with The Jealous Husband, a spiky brass necklace from around 1940 that lives up to its title.

6. Jean Schlumberger

1907-1987

Schlumberger began by turning porcelain flowers from Paris flea markets into buttons for Elsa Schiaparelli, then rose to become the defining imagination of postwar high jewelry. Recruited by Tiffany & Co. in 1956 with his own salon and the rare privilege of a signature, he filled the house with sea urchins, winged fish, and flowers that seem to move. Jacqueline Kennedy wore his paillonné enamel bangles so often the press called them Jackie bracelets. Start with Bird on a Rock from the mid-1960s, a jaunty little bird perched on an enormous gemstone, the mount later chosen for the 128-carat Tiffany Diamond itself.

7. Margaret De Patta

1903-1964

De Patta is the quiet revolutionary of this list, the founder in spirit of the American studio jewelry movement. After studying with the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy in Chicago around 1940, she applied constructivist ideas of space, light, and structure to the brooch and the ring, working with the San Francisco lapidary Francis Sperisen to develop opticut stones, quartz faceted so it bends and mirrors the silver armature beneath. Believing good design belonged to everyone, she also produced affordable limited editions and helped found the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco. Start with any of her rutilated quartz brooches from the 1940s, tiny transparent architectures for the lapel.

8. Art Smith

1917-1982

Born in Cuba to Jamaican parents and raised in Brooklyn, Smith opened a Greenwich Village shop in 1946 and became one of the leading modernist jewelers in America, a rare Black designer in a nearly closed field. He thought of jewelry as sculpture completed only by the body, shaping copper and brass into biomorphic forms that climb the forearm and wrap the neck, ideas sharpened by designing for the Black dance companies of Talley Beatty and Pearl Primus. His work reached Vogue and, decades later, a Brooklyn Museum retrospective. Start with the Lava bracelet, a rolling cuff of cutout waves that engulfs half the forearm.

9. Andrew Grima

1921-2007

Grima, an Anglo-Italian engineer with no formal training, dragged fine jewelry into the 1960s. From his sculptural bronze-fronted shop on London’s Jermyn Street he sold craggy, textured gold set with rough crystals and unfashionable stones, wearable geology for the space age. In 1966 he won the Duke of Edinburgh’s Prize for Elegant Design and a royal warrant followed; Princess Margaret famously wore his gold cast of a piece of lichen, and he collected more De Beers Diamonds International Awards than any other jeweler. Start with the About Time watches he created for Omega around 1970, timepieces hidden behind slices of gemstone so the hour reads through smoky quartz.

10. Elsa Peretti

1940-2021

A Florentine model turned designer in Halston’s New York circle, Peretti joined Tiffany & Co. in 1974 and rewrote the rules of luxury with organic forms polished to liquid smoothness. She put sterling silver back on Tiffany’s counters, making great design attainable for people who could never buy diamonds, and her Open Heart, Bean, and Diamonds by the Yard designs became some of the best-selling jewelry of the century, at times generating around a tenth of the company’s sales. Minimalism in jewelry simply looks the way she made it look. Start with the Bone cuff, a sculpted band that hugs the wrist as if it grew there.

Final thoughts

What unites a Sicilian duke, a Bauhaus-trained Californian, and the woman who tamed Cartier’s panther is a shared conviction that jewelry is design before it is treasure. Each of these ten shifted the source of a jewel’s value away from the carat scale and toward the idea: Lalique with glass and horn, Calder with brass wire, De Patta with light itself, Peretti with a curve of silver. Between them they took an art form that began the century as a portable bank account and left it a full citizen of modern design, collected by museums and worn on ordinary wrists alike.

Ten names can never hold a century, and two names hovered at the edge of this list until the very end. David Webb, whose brash enameled animal bracelets defined American maximalism in the 1960s, and Wendy Ramshaw, the British studio jeweler whose stacked ring sets on turned stands blurred jewelry and sculpture, both have strong claims on a place of their own. Consider them your next two rabbit holes, and if this list has whetted your appetite, CreARTivity’s guide to the history of jewelry traces the full story from ancient goldsmiths to the studio movement.