PARIS - The white gold teeth clench and then slide open - the zipper reveals throat and then breastbone, as a diamond tassel quivers in the cleavage.

The zipper necklace, set as a cluster of geometric gemstones, is a marvel of workmanship. And its history at Van Cleef & Arpels goes way back - to when a special client in 1939 asked the Paris jeweler for a diamond-encrusted working zipper.

This feat of technology for a madcap jewel was not achieved until 1951. By then, the client, Wallis Simpson, had become the Duchess of Windsor, and she never did have a diamond zipper to close the back of her little black dress .

But four gem-set zippers will be on display in a Van Cleef & Arpels exhibition opening February 18 at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York.

“The zipper shows jewelry’s capacity for transformation - in its function and its ability to make the ephemeral eternal,” said Stanislas de Quercize, the chief executive of Van Cleef & Arpels.

A tour of the Place Vendome on “Jewelry Day” in January showed two themes : technology and nature. For high jewelry, made almost entirely by hand, technology is still part of the process, as computers are used to develop images and make patterns. But the motifs tended to come from nature: animals, flowers.

Everything about Boucheron’s display was in the round, from the globeshaped display cabinets to the python bracelet, in rain-forest-green tsavorites, that entwines the arm and has a movable serpent’s tongue.

Boucheron’s pieces ranged from the most beautiful creations of nature to the uglier: from rings with extended swan’s wings to a crouching frog. The jewels are united not only by their inspiration from nature, but also by their three-dimensional qualities - mini sculptures that are particularly voluptuous when spilling over a ring.

Chanel had its signature camellia worked in diamond “lace.” This brooch was both a technical marvel in its precision computer pattern and a force of nature, making the lattice of diamonds and its central pearl into a camellia flower.

Since Chaumet’s symbolic bee was an emblem of its first client, Napoleon Bonaparte, the august jewelry house sucked the honey of its inspiration long before the bee was given an endangered alert.

Now, the house not only supports the “Terre d’Abeilles” campaign to save the honeybee. Its jewelry designers also found myriad ways to embrace the symbol with a collection called romantically “Bee my love.” There is a tiny bee buzzing round an open-work tiara . The bee is removable to use as a pin.

With the price of gold rising, Thierry Fritsch, Chaumet’s president , said that, even in the rarefied world of high jewelry, there needs to be “starter” pieces at under $1,300 as a honey trap for a new generation.


By SUZY MENKES