The Modernist Mrs. Maisel, a look at Jane Lynch’s studio jewelry

There’s one thing about this strange year that has been fun, re-watching shows that have become old favorites. Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is one I turn to not just for the humor and acting but for the sublime set and costume design. We’re lucky in a way to live in a time with lush productions that pay close attention to detail. In the first season, I noticed an unexpected addition to the wardrobe of the character Sophie Lennon, played by Jane Lynch. In her richly decorated townhome adorned with cosmopolitan furnishings, she decorates herself with Modernist studio jewelry. Rather than going for the flashy look of fine jewelry from the 1950s or even the glam Retro pieces of the 1940s, the production threw this curveball by incorporating the impressively sculptural Modernist designs. I don’t know the precise maker of the pieces in the shots below, but it could have been crafted by any number of jewelers working in Greenwich Village at the time.

Beginning in the 1930s, there was a parallel path in jewelry design that emerged particularly in Greenwich Village but also San Francisco, Scandinavia, and Taxco, Mexico, the Studio Jewelry Movement. Rather than use diamonds and gold or platinum, the craftsmen produced a smaller quantity of pieces in silver and copper with emphasis on sculptural designs. Studio jewelry was meant to be wearable art, and as such the pieces could be at home in the MoMA next to a Rothko or Diebenkorn moreso than a brooch from Cartier or Van Cleef & Arpels designed in this era. Artists like Art Smith and Sam Kramer on the East Coast and Margaret de Patta and Peter Macchiarini on the West Coast were some of the best known and loved of the Modernist jewelers who contributed to the movement in America, but their pieces are not often featured in period TV and film productions though they would have been known and celebrated in the artistic and intellectual communities of the time. The costume designers at Marvelous Mrs. Maisel incorporating this into the character's aesthetic just hit it out of the park, it's certainly appropriate for a Yale drama grad who rubs elbows with Aaron Copeland.