Fan Necklace

Each link of Victoria’s Fan Necklace opens like a small silver abanico, with chased ribs spreading from a clustered hinge of raised beads. The repeated fan is ornamental, but it also solves the problem of movement. Short chain connectors and curved silver bars let the necklace settle into a continuous collar while keeping each element distinct, so that the design reads as a sequence of individual gestures rather than a single rigid band. The play between open spaces, bright polished edges, and darkened recesses gives the necklace a lively surface without relying on stones or color.

Ana Brilanti’s design depends on controlled variation. The fan elements are related, but they do not behave like identical stamped units in a mechanical chain. Their ribs catch the light in narrow flashes, while the bead clusters gather weight at the base of each fan and mark the rhythm of the collar around the neck. The small arcs and scroll-like bars between the fans soften the geometry and keep the necklace from becoming diagrammatic. It has the intimacy of jewelry, but the formal confidence of a modular modern design.

The necklace also carries one of the most memorable origin stories in the history of Platería Victoria. Penny Chittim Morrill recorded Ana Brilanti’s recollection that, in the early years of the Victoria shop, a group of women came in and asked her to design a necklace for a dear friend. Brilanti drew the design and produced a necklace composed of fan-shaped elements. Only when the women returned did they reveal that the gift was intended for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and they asked Brilanti not to make the design again until Roosevelt gave permission. A card later arrived from the White House, signed by Mrs. Roosevelt, saying that so many friends had admired the necklace that Brilanti should be allowed to reproduce it. The collar de abanicos thus entered Victoria’s regular vocabulary through a commission that joined Taxco design, women’s patronage, and international admiration at a particularly formative moment.

Brilanti opened Platería Victoria in Taxco in 1940, and the Fan Necklace belongs to the kind of work that made her shop recognizable within the Mexican silver renaissance: inventive, wearable, and directed by a designer who understood ornament as construction. In this collar, the fan is not treated as a flat motif applied to jewelry. It becomes the working unit of the necklace, determining its articulation, spacing, weight, and light. That unity of design and structure explains why the model could be made repeatedly without losing its identity. It remains one of Brilanti’s clearest achievements, a piece in which a graceful social commission became a durable modern form.