The heart has spent centuries accumulating meaning. Medieval manuscripts painted it as a vessel of devotion. Victorian jewelers engraved it with initials and locks of hair. By the twentieth century, it had become a symbol so overused it risked collapsing under its own sentimentality. Mauboussin, in its creative wisdom, did something surprising; rather than reinvent the heart, it multiplied it.
Thirty identical forms travel around the neck with mathematical regularity, each one cast in solid 18-karat yellow gold and joined by concealed articulations that allow the collar to move with the body. Together they weigh an impressive 105.4 grams. Seen from a distance, the individual hearts dissolve into a continuous band of reflected gold.
That fascination with order runs through the history of Mauboussin. Under Georges Mauboussin, and later his engineer son Pierre-Yves, the Parisian Maison became one of the great modernizers of French jewelry. Their work earned the Gold Medal at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, the exhibition that gave Art Deco its name. In the following decade, the house transformed its Place Vendôme salon into something closer to a cultural institution, staging gemstone exhibitions that drew the Prince of Wales alongside the Maharajahs of Kapurthala and Indore. Hollywood followed soon after. Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Paulette Goddard and Audrey Hepburn belonged to different generations and cultivated entirely different personas, yet they arrived at the same jeweler. Mauboussin offered something larger than fashion: it belonged to the Paris of collectors, aviators, industrialists and modern art patrons.
This collar reflects that instinct. A single heart tells a story. Thirty hearts establish a cadence. The necklace recalls the disciplined seriality of Brancusi's Endless Column, where one repeated shape acquires momentum simply by refusing to change. Mauboussin understood that repetition has its own emotional register: not the excitement of a grand gesture, but the accumulated force of something chosen again and again. That may be the most convincing definition of love ever cast in gold.
Designer: Mauboussin
Period: Vintage
Year: 1980s
Material: 18k Yellow Gold
Condition: Very Good
Weight: 105 Grams
Size: 17 Inches Long
Made in France
