Half-Moon Crescent-Link Belt / Necklace

A sequence of half-moon links, each a broad crescent of sterling silver, carries this object well beyond the scale of ordinary jewelry. Worn as a belt at the waist or looped as a necklace across the collarbone, it becomes a run of sculptural silver elements that follow the body's line. The crescents are simple in outline but substantial in presence, and their repetition gives the piece a rhythm closer to architectural detailing than to filigree or granulation. Héctor Aguilar treated adornment here as body-based modern design, a continuous band of form rather than a pendant or a cluster of small stones.

The design depends on the way identical crescent shapes are joined into a flexible chain. Each half-moon reads as a clean, curved plane, and when the links align across the body they alternate solid metal with the openings between them, so that light and negative space fall into a steady beat. Silver carries this idea directly. The metal's reflectivity turns each crescent into a small moving surface, catching and releasing light as the wearer shifts. Aguilar favored broad, planar silver and firm construction over delicate ornament, and the crescent-link format shows that preference at a larger scale, where the weight and articulation of the chain matter as much as the individual link.

Aguilar directed the Taller Borda in Taxco, and his work is marked by this confidence with mass and by an interest in strong, legible forms drawn in metal. Morrill's survey of his output records related necklaces from the mid-1940s, including a solid silver drops necklace of about 1945 and a malachite and silver necklace of roughly 1945 to 1950, both built from repeated silver elements strung into a continuous line. The half-moon belt or necklace belongs to that same working vocabulary: adornment conceived as a series of clear silver units rather than as a single ornamental centerpiece. It reflects how Taxco designers of the period expanded the field of jewelry to include the waist and the full length of the body, not only the throat and the wrist.

The object is useful for showing that the Taxco renaissance produced modern body ornament at architectural scale, where a designer could treat the belt line as a place for serious sculptural work in silver. Its dual function, belt or necklace, underscores how Aguilar built pieces around form and articulation that could be worn in more than one way. Within a collection, it clarifies the expansive side of Aguilar's practice and the broader ambition of Taxco design to make wearable silver that behaves like sculpture in motion.