Pointed-Link Silver Bracelet

Flat silver bars lie side by side in a wide, supple band, each link pivoting on a hidden rivet so the whole bracelet flexes and ripples around the wrist like a length of machine tread. Open rectangular gaps run between the bars, and the squared, slightly canted ends give the band a stripped, architectural rhythm. It is a piece of clean machine-age hardware rendered in solid silver, the kind of unornamented modern form Fred Davis put before the North American visitors who came to Sanborn's.

Seen from the back the construction is frank: rows of flat bars riveted into a continuous mesh, nothing applied, no stones and no engraving. The effect is all interval and articulation, bright metal catching the light and falling away into the open spaces between the links. Weight and movement do the work that ornament does elsewhere.

The bracelet is sterling, struck FD and STERLING MEXICO. Davis ran the silver counter at Sanborn's in Mexico City and, rather than work the metal himself, commissioned independent silversmiths to make his designs — among them Valentín Vidaurreta, as Morrill records. He was the first to understand what the North American tourists arriving from the late 1920s wanted, and substantial link bracelets belonged to that range.

Built from a single bar multiplied across the wrist, it is industrial geometry made wearable — silver treated as structure rather than surface, and the better for carrying nothing it doesn't need.