Design 5405 bracelet

The bracelet bearing design number 5405 belongs to the numbered series that Margot de Taxco developed as a sustained creative vocabulary, one that treated enamel-on-silver not as embellishment but as the primary language of the work. Her numbered designs gave each piece a catalog permanence that has proved useful to collectors and scholars alike, and the bracelet form in enamel sits squarely within what Morrill identifies as her signature production.

Morrill describes her champlevé bracelets, necklaces, and earrings as "glittering displays of color, texture, and technical perfection," finding in them an elegance of line and sensuality of color that has not dated (Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 166). The technique itself was one she helped bring to maturity: champlevé enameling on silver was initiated at Los Castillo by Reveriano Castillo and Miguel Melendez, and it was Margot who perfected and developed it into a major line of jewelry (Morrill, p. 166). After establishing her own taller, she hired Sigfrido Pineda in 1950 specifically to oversee the silver enameling, providing the technical continuity that sustained her numbered designs across decades of workshop production (Morrill, p. 192).

A design number intact on a piece like this connects directly back to her catalogued system, a reminder that her enameled output was organized from the start as a body of work, not a set of individual objects.