1925: Two Necklaces, One Year, and the Centenary of Art Deco

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What did the year 1925 know that we are still trying to articulate a century later? In Paris that spring, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes opened its gates and gave a movement its name. In New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, the novel that would come to be regarded as the Great American Novel. On Place Vendôme, Boucheron unveiled a transformable ruby, emerald, onyx and diamond necklace at the Exposition itself. And in Cartier’s New York atelier, a special commission took its final form: a long sautoir of pearls and emerald beads, centred on an 86.71-carat carved emerald. Four events, one year, one creative climate — and on 13 May 2026, two of those four objects will return to the saleroom together.

Christie’s announces today the early highlights of its Geneva Magnificent Jewels auction, to be held live at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues. Both 1925 necklaces lead the offering at CHF 240,000–400,000 (US$ 310,000–510,000), and they arrive at auction precisely as the centenary of Art Deco invites a fuller reckoning with what that decade made possible. Together with a broader group of museum-quality Art Deco lots, they form a portrait of the most ambitious moment in the history of twentieth-century jewellery design.

The Cartier Sautoir: 86.71 Carats and a Starring Role

Created by Cartier New York in 1925, the sautoir began its life as a special commission. One of the Maison’s most important clients already owned the centrepiece — a spectacular carved emerald of 86.71 carats — and requested that Cartier reimagine it as a work of Art Deco design. The result is a long necklace of natural pearls and emerald beads, culminating in the carved emerald pendant, which depicts the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati in a feat of lapidary artistry that collapses centuries of Indian gem-carving tradition into a single object. The Mughal-influenced practice of carving emeralds with figural and floral motifs had long fascinated the great Paris maisons: Cartier in particular had been acquiring and incorporating carved gems from the Indian subcontinent since the early twentieth century, a dialogue between East and West that became one of the defining signatures of the house’s Art Deco vocabulary.

The sautoir’s second life arrived in 1974, when it was selected for the film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — the novel published, with near-perfect symmetry, in the same year the jewel was made. To evoke the opulence of the Jazz Age, costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge worked directly with Cartier and the house’s longtime designer Alfred Durante (1923–2022), building an entire jewellery wardrobe for Mia Farrow and the principal female cast. The sautoir was worn by Jordan Baker, portrayed by Lois Chiles, during the group’s electric evening in New York City — its fluid strands of pearls and emerald beads capturing, in motion, everything the era stood for. Aldredge received the Academy Award for her work on the production. Two years after the film’s release, Cartier mounted the Louis Cartier Retrospective in New York, where the jewels worn on screen were displayed as cultural artefacts in their own right — a recognition that these objects had transcended their original function and entered the larger history of twentieth-century style.

For the collector, the sautoir presents a rare confluence of provenance: Cartier New York, 1925, with a documented exhibition and film history, centred on a carved emerald of exceptional size and iconographic significance. Natural pearls of the quality used in such necklaces have become increasingly scarce at auction, and the combination of carved Mughal-style gemstone, pearl strand, and cinematic provenance places this lot in a category of its own.

The Boucheron Necklace: Four Jewels in One

Boucheron’s contribution to the auction is a study in architectural ingenuity. Created on Place Vendôme around 1925, the necklace is composed of rubies, emeralds, onyx and diamonds set in platinum — a palette that distils the chromatic boldness of Art Deco into a single object — and constructed to detach into four independent sections: two bracelets and a choker, in addition to the full necklace configuration. This capacity for transformation was no mere novelty; it reflected a fundamental shift in how jewels were conceived in the 1920s, as objects designed to accompany a modern, mobile woman whose wardrobe demanded versatility and whose taste demanded wit.

The decorative grammar of the necklace draws on one of the most resonant motifs of early twentieth-century Paris: the stylised rose. The pattern had become emblematic of couturier Paul Poiret through the work of his illustrator and designer Paul Iribe, who created the famous stylised rose around 1908–1909 — a form that rippled outward from the fashion world into the decorative arts, architecture, and jewellery over the following decades. When Boucheron presented this necklace at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris — the exhibition that gave Art Deco its name — the rose motif carried with it the full weight of that cross-disciplinary conversation.

The necklace also belongs to a longer internal narrative within Boucheron’s own history of technical innovation. The Maison had introduced its revolutionary Question Mark necklace in 1879 — a jewel designed to move with the body rather than constrain it — and had followed this in 1889 with feather-light constructions that challenged prevailing assumptions about the density and rigidity of jewellery. The 1925 necklace extends that lineage: a jewel that refuses to be a single thing, insisting on plurality of form and function.

A Broader Deco Panorama

The two headline lots are joined at auction by further Art Deco highlights that underscore the breadth of the period’s achievements. An Art Deco garnet and diamond necklace attributed to Cartier carries an estimate of CHF 160,000–240,000, while an impressive Cartier Art Deco diamond tiara — a form that speaks to the era’s theatrical approach to adornment — is estimated at CHF 260,000–480,000. A Van Cleef & Arpels sapphire and diamond ‘Fuchsia’ Mystery-Set clip-brooch, estimated at CHF 100,000–150,000, represents the house’s legendary serti mystérieux technique, in which stones appear to float without visible settings — one of the most demanding feats in the history of jewellery manufacture.

Taken together, this group of lots offers a portrait of Art Deco at its most confident: a movement that fused modernist geometry with the rich material cultures of Egypt, India and the ancient world; that dressed the women of the Jazz Age in platinum and coloured stones; and that produced, in the space of two extraordinary decades, some of the most technically accomplished and culturally resonant jewels ever made.

Christie’s Geneva Magnificent Jewels auction takes place on 13 May 2026 at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues. Further information is available at christies.com.