The chain as the piece

Chain is bought by the length, and the name of Elsa Peretti's best-known line plays on it. Soon after she joined Tiffany in 1974 she spaced diamonds in thin flat bezels along a fine gold chain, so the stones seemed scattered on the skin, and the line became Diamonds by the Yard, a name often credited to her friend Halston. Here the chain was no longer something a pendant hung from. Mario Buccellati had made the same case in the 1930s with Hawaii, hundreds of tiny rings coiled from twisted gold thread and linked like a lei, and in 1967 Pino Rabolini founded Pomellato in Milan on gourmette links and long sautoirs meant for daytime.

Later houses broke the chain into parts. Gianni Bulgari, doodling brackets in a design meeting, saw the sign as a modular link, and Parentesi followed in 1982. DoDo, opened in Milan in 1994, sells its Granelli grains and, since 2000, its sea-worn Pepita beads one at a time, so a bracelet can fill up over years. Messika threaded a diamond rivière on tiny springs for Skinny in 2009, Tiffany built HardWear in 2017 from a 1962 bracelet in its archive, and in 2021 Pomellato swelled its first-season gourmette until three or four links make a ring.