Lalique

I went to the Musee de la Mode et du Textiles today, mainly to look at the jewelry exhibit. It's a very small museum and only a fraction of it's some 70,000 pieces of jewelry are ever out at one time. Which might be a good thing, because frankly, I think it would have been unbelievably overwhelming to have more than 2 tiny rooms of the stuff.

The first room was the best. It held jewelry from the 18th to 20th centuries, with a few pieces from the 16th, if I remember correctly. And wow, was most of it gorgeous. But the best, most elaborate, stuff was the early century stuff and the Lalique. I'd only ever seen pictures of Lalique anything in the past. It's extremely valuable and collectible, and almost all of it is in private collections or owned by museums who don't allow it to be photographed. But I've seen the odd photograph in books and gone wow, that's elaborate stuff.

Honey, you have no idea what elaborate is. And you won't, until you see the art nouveau jewelry Lalique designed. And no photograph in the world will ever do any of it justice. It's just beautiful. It's fluid and vibrant, and so creative, you just can't talke it all in. It's really just awesome, awesome stuff. Gold, enamel, glass, colored gems, you name it. Lalique was also the first guy to really use color in fine jewelry. You have him to thank for the popularity of vibrant colors in fine jewelry, pretty much. The image below doesn't do his work justice and is of a much simpler piece than I'm taking about, but you can see how he used color and get an idea of his style. It was awesome. :)