Armadillo Bracelet

The armadillo bracelet takes the animal's segmented shell as a structural idea rather than an illustration: a band of overlapping convex silver plaques, each held by a small domed rivet, that flexes around the wrist the way natural armor flexes over a body. Nothing about it is pictorial. The creature survives only as a system of imbricated scales, and that act of abstraction, turning a Mexican animal into pure articulated form, is what gives the design its force within Héctor Aguilar's output, where figural conceits of this kind are far scarcer than his geometric and stone-set cuff work.

Each plaque is raised to a shallow dome with a bordered rim, its polished crown catching light against the shadowed overlaps, so the bracelet reads as a run of lapped silver shells rather than a chain of links. The rivets that pin the segments are left frank and visible, functioning at once as construction and as ornament, a directness of making characteristic of the Taller Borda workshop Aguilar established in Taxco in 1939, where heavy-gauge silver and honest, hand-worked joinery defined the house manner in the years around 1940 to 1950.

The design also lent itself to a full parure: the same lapped-disc vocabulary appears scaled up for a necklace and belt mounted on black ribbon and leather, and scaled down for earrings, evidence of how completely the workshop could carry a single sculptural idea across the body. Morrill's Silver Masters of Mexico documents the range of Aguilar's articulated bracelet forms from this period, from copper and silver combinations to domed and amethyst-set bands, and this bracelet sits at the inventive end of that spectrum, a small wearable sculpture that shows why the Taxco school belongs to the story of modern design.