Woven Small-Link Silver Bracelet

Rows of short silver bar-links run lengthwise down the band, each gently peaked along its top and joined to its neighbors by hidden connecting links, so the whole bracelet flexes like a length of mesh and sits heavy and wide across the wrist. There is no flower, no figure, no applied ornament anywhere on it: the design is built entirely from the repeat, a machine-age idea carried out in silver. It is the kind of cool, industrial form Fred Davis put before North American visitors in Mexico City, where flowers and folk motifs were the usual currency.

The strength of the piece is its discipline. Five parallel rows of the small links, articulated end to end, give the band a dense woven texture and a continuous play of light as the peaked bars catch and break it row by row. The bracelet closes with an integral tongue-and-box clasp set flush into the structure, so the woven surface runs unbroken around the wrist.

The bracelet carries Davis's FD mark with a SILVER MEXICO stamp. Davis ran the silver counter at Sanborn's from the late 1920s and, as Morrill records, produced none of the work himself, instead commissioning independent silversmiths in Mexico City to supply his clientele. Pieces in this idiom came out of that arrangement: a designer's eye for spare modern form, executed by hand in the capital's workshops.

Substantial in both width and weight, it is a clear statement of the restrained, modern taste Davis brought to Mexican silver.