For all the dresses, diamonds, and dramatic water-taxi entrances that define the collective image of Venice Film Festival, one of Kendall Jenner’s most special accessories this week was a true “if you know you know” moment. While in Venice for her first-ever turn on the storied Lido, Jenner stepped out in a smoke-gray, bell-sleeved, silky and sheer Vivienne Westwood dress, a woven Maison Ola basket bag, vintage Manolos (from her go-to, The Vintage Marché), and a pair of abstract silver earrings.
To the uninitiated eye, they were simply an elegant, slightly off-kilter addition to the look, fitting into Jenner’s pared back, The Row-forward aesthetic. But they are, truly, miniature works of art: a pair of Alexander Calder earrings dating to 1955, made from hammered silver and steel wire. And they weren’t pulled from the archive of a major jewelry house; they came from Louisa Guinness, the London-based gallerist who has spent decades collecting, commissioning, and dealing in jewelry made by artists, from Calder and Man Ray to Niki De Saint Phalle and Anish Kapoor.
The request reached Guinness through the Calder Foundation, a trail that weaved through the foundation, a New York collector, and Jenner’s stylist Dani Michelle, eventually landing at her gallery. “Her stylist said, ‘We’re looking for some Calder earrings.’ And so I sent her a small selection,” Guinness tells Vogue. Calder earrings are particularly scarce, Guinness says, even within a body of jewelry that has become highly collectible in its own right.
I don’t have so many earrings left
“I don’t have so many earrings left. Earrings are quite rare and rings are rare,” she says. The pair Jenner wore were especially difficult for Guinness to relinquish. “I love those earrings, they were hard to let go of!” And compared with some of Calder’s more imposing, sculptural pieces, “they’re very easy to wear… so they’re perfect, and particularly perfect for Kendall’s sense of style.” Jenner is also a known art collector, with a collection that includes a James Turrell sculpture, a neon light installation by Tracey Emin, and pieces by Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, Lauren Greenfield, and Sterling Ruby.
American artist Calder is, of course, better known for the abstract mobiles that transformed modern sculpture, as well as his playful Circus, assembled from wire, cardboard, buttons, cork, and other everyday materials. Jewelry, however, was hardly a footnote to his practice. His first pieces were made for his sister’s dolls, and by 1929 his jewelry was already being exhibited in galleries.
Over the decades that followed, Calder returned again and again to wearable objects, working largely in relatively humble materials like brass and silver wire and occasionally making pieces spontaneously for friends. That modesty of material was, for the age, radical. Calder’s jewelry was “deeply unconventional in their time.” In an era when diamonds, precious stones, and mink were part of the looks du jour, his bold spirals, loops, hammered surfaces, and calligraphic lines were almost out of step with traditional notions of fine jewelry.
For all their modernity, many look closer
For all their modernity, many look closer to ancient artefacts than the contemporary bijoux. Their value was coded differently, and the bohemian art world knew it—as per Georgia O’Keeffe and, most prominently, Peggy Guggenheim. Another distinction that makes them particularly alluring to collectors today is that Calder largely fashioned the jewelry himself. “They were made by him, by his fair hand.
Nobody else’s,” Guinness says. With much artist-designed jewelry, “there’s a goldsmith involved,” she notes, whereas Calder’s pieces were physically “touched by the artist.”
There could hardly have been a more fitting city in which to do it, as Guinness says. Peggy Guggenheim was Venice’s legendary adopted art-world grande dame, and was both a champion of Calder and an enthusiastic wearer of his jewelry.
She famously owned Calder earrings, while his sculptural Silver Bedhead occupied her Venetian palazzo and now lives at the museum in Venice. When she opened her New York gallery Art of This Century in 1942, Guggenheim wore one earring by Calder and another by the Surrealist movement pioneer Yves Tanguy in a typically eccentric demonstration of allegiance to both abstraction and Surrealism.
Kendall Jenner obviously had Guggenheim front of mind
Kendall Jenner obviously had Guggenheim front of mind when visiting the canal-rivuleted city. Elsewhere on the trip, she wore a pair of dramatically flared pointed sunglasses that recreated Guggenheim’s shades. “I saw her wearing the glasses,” Guinness says. “The glasses got way more attention than the earrings, but for people who know, the earrings are very, very special.
Calder jewelry is like a little club.”
The model bought the earrings from Guinness. “So many people just ask to borrow them, but she actually was interested,” Guinness says. “She’s interested in the art side of it, so I find that really interesting.” For Guinness, Jenner’s purchase also hints at the possibility of a new generation discovering artist-made jewelry beyond the handful of names already familiar to collectors.
“There are lots of other artists that have made jewelry that people don’t know about,” she says. She already has a possible next step in mind for Jenner: minimalist-but-statement pieces Guinness previously created with Anish Kapoor. Or perhaps something vintage, continuing the Guggenheim thread, like the wearable art by avant-garde Argentine-Italian sculptor and painter Lucio Fontana.
For now, though, Calder feels just right. Almost 70 years after the earrings were made, their strange, hand-wrought lines still look decidedly modern. Guinness has a few Calder brooches in her collection, pieces that became a serious fall 2026 runway trend thanks to Giorgio Armani, Tory Burch, and Simone Rocha. “I’d like to see more men wearing his pins,” reflects Guinness.
“Maybe we’ll see Jacob Elordi in a pin…”
Source: www.vogue.com
