The 1961 International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery, organised jointly by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths and the Victoria and Albert Museum, was the world’s first international display of contemporary jewellery.
While the exhibition included pieces from as early as the 1890s, with the aim of reinvigorating the British jewellery trade after Second World War austerity, it is best remembered for the new work shown by the emerging breed of designers that helped put the swing into the Sixties.
Prior to the 1961 exhibition, each participant had been sent a matchbox full of wax to model a jewel with their ideas then cast into metal. The results, often ingenious both in terms of form and in the novel treatment of materials, demonstrated the possibilities of jewellery as an art form and challenged the tradition that valuable gemstones were required to make fine jewellery.