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We are in an era before Lalique and Duguine and Lafitte. We are in a time when women were not yet in the forefront of jewelry design. It was considered quite gauche in those days to have one lady to wear upon her bosom the image in gold of another lady in all the splendiferousness of her nakedness Till one day ... in the late 1800's to early 1900's a movement in the decorative arts surfaced ... and Art Nouveau made its appearance heralded by the above mentioned artists.
It was around this same time that some clever rascal ... surely sitting in his dingy lab in a dank dark dungeon in the middle of a metropolis which ignored his apparent genius thinking it to be the machinations of a foul-minded lunatic ... it was around this same time that our rascal began examining some bugs with close scrutiny and began to see in every gossamer wing and every jointed leg and each protruding thorax the figure of a beautiful woman. Genius comes in many forms my friends.
I digress for a micro-second of time to ask this pithy question: Do you like striking? Do you like drop-dead gorgeous? If yes ... read on. If nay ... desist. I now un-digress.
As the art nouveau movement took on steam it coincided with women's consciousness and sense of selves. The suffragettes were still a ways off ... but the women's demands were on the increase. In their quests for equality and freedom there grew a flamboyance which manifested itself in outrageous designs ... the more bizarre the better.
René Lalique is supposed to have been the first goldsmith since the late Renaissance to depict the female nude in jewelry. Of the daring images shown by him and others like him ... there were snakes ... winged creatures like bats ... peacocks ... insects ... and most depraved of them all ... winged female nudes. For the lascivious and the warped of the time ... it was to salivate from. Blasé as we are today ... though we may salivate less ... these jewelry trends are still fantastical.
I bring you today Lalique's Dragonfly Corsage ...a woman--naked to the waist-- protruding from a dragonfly's body ... being swallowed or spit out. Her arms are now insect wings. She has oversized gold claws for ripping her victims to shreds. She is sublime and predatory ... she is eternally female while also mythic. She in incomparable.
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