Brand-Chatillon
Glamor, luxury, and elegance: it is largely what Art Deco embraced and it is what you see pictured before you.
This advertisement for Brand-Chatillon is from the July-December 1938 issue of Vogue, which I observed at the University of Georgia’s main library. Brand-Chatillon Company was founded by George A. Brand in Buffalo, New York in 1911, and it excelled in crafting chic design pieces for women wanting a lifestyle of lush enchantment.
This ad is the spitting image of what the Art Deco Movement was all about. Brand-Chatillon offers a bracelet accented with baguette sapphires and diamonds as well a matching clip studded with sapphires too. These lavish pieces evoke a keen sense of glamor, which ties back to the prevalent, widespread societal desire at the time to embrace a luxurious lifestyle, or to at least add on a filter of luxury to one’s life; however, it is almost possible to feel a type of indescribable allure when looking at this image, which I feel is created by the long radiating straight lines that the pieces float over. Below these pieces, one can recognize the almost seamless transition of design to type as it effortlessly directs your attention to the modern serif typeface with Art Deco styling which reads “BRAND-CHATILLON, Jewelers and Silversmiths.”
Within the ad, one can observe that it reads that Brand-Chatillon “has always believed in exceptional pieces, moderately priced.” This 1938 ad lists the price of the bracelet as $525 and the price of the matching clip as $225, but when considering inflation, the prices of these items would be much higher today. After using a U.S. Inflation calculator, I was able to gather that today the bracelet would cost about $11,200, and the matching clip would cost roughly $4,800 (a 2,033.6% rate of inflation for the two items).
Unfortunately, after extensive efforts to procure a deep look into Brand-Chatillon Co., not much is known about the brand and this particular advertisement other than what I gathered about its founding as well as the fact that company founder George A. Brand died at the age of 77 on March 6, 1940.
-Marko Peric
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/art/Art-Deco
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
Greetings from Retro Design: Vintage Graphics Decade by Decade (by Tony Seddon)
