Bookended by World War I and the collapse of the stock market, the 1920s were a brief and combustible period of glamorous mythmaking. Case in point: the gauzy origins of the attention grabbing cocktail rings that many a flapper wore on her right-hand index finger, supposedly to signal to a speakeasy bartender that she was looking for a pour of the real stuff. By the late 1950s, a new generation of Hollywood starlets and Stork Club patrons had rediscovered the enormous bijoux, and the New York City-born jeweller Harry Winston, mostly known for his spectacular diamonds set in platinum, began hatching plans for coloured cocktail rings of his own. Recently, the house’s designers unearthed in their archives never-used sketches he made during that era; to bring them to life, they added traditional stones like rubies, emeralds and sapphires to a confectionary explosion of modern hard-candy hues: Italian ice blue aquamarines, raspberry red spinels, purplish tourmalines. This platinum ring, with a 15-carat oval tsavorite garnet at its centre, big and juicy as a lozenge, is surrounded by peridots, diamonds and pink sapphires: pure sugar shock.
Harry Winston Candy ring, price on request, harrywinston.com.
