Zig Zag Chevron Necklace

This necklace is one of the most famous forms from the Taxco school and an exemplary object for understanding Antonio Pineda’s contribution to Mexican modernist silver. It depends on no stones, iconography, or applied ornament: the drama comes from engineered repetition, weight, bevel, hinge, and light. Pineda was one of Taxco’s greatest innovators and emphasized the relationship between his jewelry and the human form. The Zig Zag Chevron necklace anchors Pineda’s all-silver geometric work at its most forceful, a canonical Taxco design reduced to edge, articulation, and presence.

This articulated collar turns a zig-zag line into architecture. Graduated pointed links, each raised into a central ridge and flanked by angled planes, form a serrated silver corona around the neck: emphatic at the front, narrowing toward the clasp, and animated by the polished reflections moving across every bevel. The reverse marks, SILVER, HECHO EN MEXICO, Antonio Pineda’s crown, eagle mark, 970, and YY 512, place the necklace within Pineda’s mature Taxco production. Published Pineda scholarship records the YY prefix as a necklace inventory series, the Antonio-Taxco crown as the workshop hallmark, and 970 as the higher silver standard often associated with Pineda’s work. Stromberg’s catalogue situates Pineda’s all-silver geometric jewelry as miniature sculpture extending into three dimensions; this necklace makes that principle literal, using silver itself as structure, surface, movement, and adornment. Its two parallel fine-link chains allow the heavy individual elements to articulate independently, so that what first reads as a rigid modernist collar conforms closely to the body.