Should she, for reasons of fashion or custom, or for other personal reasons, desire to wear a watch, its functional aspects should be minimized by adornment, if not wholly concealed in a jewel. For this purpose, effective eye-catching bracelets can be devised of diamonds or diamonds and pearls. To the beauty of the modern watches, the Swiss firm of Gubelin Frères has contributed a great deal. This firm, probably more than any other famous Swiss craftsmen, has succeeded in making the watch a masterpiece of design and beauty. Gubelin added to the improvement of the mechanical performance of the modern watch high artistic value.
There are beautiful flower brooches in the heart of which hides a watch. There are pendants, for a loose necklace or a brooch, the bottom of which is the watch face. In greater variety, the wrist watch can be fashioned into a gem-studded beauty, as in the $20,000 diamond bracelet watch sent by jewelers of Geneva to Elizabeth II of England on her wedding day.
Three parts of the wrist watch may be distinguished for purposes of adornment. First the bracelet as a whole may be an attractive jewel. It may be of plain or of twisted gold; or it may be a circle of small diamonds or other stones. In still other ways, the entire band may be ornamented, with the watch drawn into the unity of the jewel design. Secondly, the main circle of the band may be of plain gold, with the ornamentation beginning where the bracelet meets the watch. For an inch or so on either side of the watch, the band may widen in a swirl of domed gold wire, or some other modern patterns; or the band may there be set with diamonds, baguette or marquise. Finally, there is the watch itself, which may be circled or otherwise encased in diamonds. The design of the bracelet, however, may almost wholly conceal the watch. Some settings have been made in which a large stone covers the watch face, and must be lifted to reveal the time.
The wrist watch, for practical reasons, should not be worn on the handbag arm; the winding crown may be jarred or broken. For both practical and aesthetic reasons, it should not be worn with other bracelets. The glass may be jarred off. And while the watch bracelet may look attractive alone, the presence of other jewels makes its utilitarian function over-prominent. The wrist watch should be serviceable, but beautiful.
In any case, a watch is at best an interloper, if not a downright intruder, in moments of feminine finery. Permitting a woman to espy the hour when she should not be so concerned, the watch—like all spies—should be as much as possible unnoticed and unknown. If it be worn, it should not be as a watch but as an integral part of a jewel.
In Front of Your Mirror
A wise woman knows the importance of her jewels and does not squander them in overlavish display. The “principle of parsimony” applies here as elsewhere: unless there be an overriding reason for elaboration, the simplest means are the best. Jewels may, as we have seen, be beautiful on many parts of the body—but not on all of them at once. Each occasion, each costume, calls for separate consideration and individual selection of jewels.
It is not vanity, but common sense, for a woman to spend time before a mirror, making her own acquaintance, becoming familiar with her qualities and with the values brought out by various arrangements of her jewels. Only by such a process, renewed frequently through the years (as jewels and features alter), can a woman command the full power of her treasure chest as a true ally to her own beauty.
Daniel Webster, looking at the great stone face of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” observed: “Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades: shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers, a monster watch ... but up in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that here He makes men.” And let them not mar themselves, Shakespeare reminds us, including the fair sex of the human kind. And a woman, whose sign is beauty, keeps a “monster watch” over her harmony in her jewels. Decorum and decoration, hand in hand, lead her to the fullest capture of the values with which nature has endowed her and which she has helped to foster, feed and bring to flower.