The inventive style also inextricably links style with jewelry

In the 1930s, Paris was the creative center of the avant-garde, as well as the Duchess of Windsor certainly captured the spirit with the times with an avant-garde notion of her personal: She wanted a fully functioning zipper embellished with gemstones and diamonds, and she asked the French jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels to create it. The Duchess, acknowledged for her individualistic style, collaborated within the design with all the house's artistic director, Renee Puissant, the daughter of founders Estelle and Alfred Van Cleef. Puissant presented a sketch, but alas, for reasons unknown the Duchess never made the commission.

It was not until 1951 that the home created what would grow to be one of its most iconic and complex pieces: a working, flexible gold zipper necklace adorned with diamonds and jewels that transforms into a bracelet when zipped. The piece perfectly reflects the 1930s' surrealist motion in art and style, says Nicolas Bos, president and CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels inside the Americas, and worldwide creative director. "We took one thing from a completely different universe used in daily life-the zipper-and brought it in to the world of preciousness and fine jewelry," Bos says.

The inventive style also inextricably links fashion with jewelry, which is why Van Cleef & Arpels chose to unveil four new renditions of the Zip necklace during the Paris Haute Couture shows in late January. Amongst the versions is definitely an Art Deco-style necklace with geometric patterns in mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli, and another having a melange of multicolored sapphires.

Some of Van Cleef & Arpels' earlier Zip styles are on show in an expansive exhibition, Set in Type: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels, at the Cooper-Hewitt National Style Museum in New York through June five. The exhibit showcases far more than 300 pieces of jewelry, watches, and sketches illustrating the house's influence on design over the past century. But despite all of the fanfare, those who wish for a Zip necklace of their personal should not expect to acquire one easily: It takes a team of skilled craftsmen from 400 to 1,000 hours to create 1, and as a lot as a year for a special-order style to be completed.

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