Paul Flato was the American jeweller whose Manhattan and Beverly Hills salons, between 1928 and the early 1940s, served the first generation of Hollywood film stars and produced jewellery that bridged the geometric Art Deco of the 1920s and the softer, more figurative work that would define mid-century American design. Flato's clientele — Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Cole Porter, and the wealthier studio executives — gave him the platform to develop a distinctive design vocabulary built on whimsical naturalistic motifs (flowers, animals, hearts, ribbons, and the small "figural" pieces that defined his name) rendered in platinum, gold, and coloured gemstones with a sense of movement and dimensionality not previously associated with American fine jewellery.

Career and the salons

Flato opened his first salon at 1 East 57th Street in Manhattan in 1928 and rapidly attracted the Manhattan and Hollywood social set. The salon's combination of bespoke commission and small-batch "ready-to-wear" pieces was unusual for the period; clients could order one-off works in collaboration with Flato or buy from the salon's regularly refreshed stock. In 1937, Flato opened a Beverly Hills salon at 8657 Sunset Boulevard, the first major fine jewellery house to set up at the centre of Hollywood, and the location quickly became a fixture of the studio social calendar. Flato's lead designer for much of this period was Fulco di Verdura, who joined the atelier in 1934 and worked under Flato's direction before opening his own salon in 1939.

Design vocabulary

Flato's work is recognisable by several recurring features. Figural motifs — animals, flowers, hands, hearts, and small narrative elements — set in three dimensions rather than as flat profiles. The use of coloured gemstones (sapphires, rubies, emeralds, citrines, aquamarines) as both colour and texture, often in unusual combinations and with deliberately mismatched cuts. Movement and articulation built into the jewellery itself, with brooches and pendants designed so that elements would shift or sway when worn. And a sense of humour and narrative that distinguished the work from the more austere geometry of European Art Deco. The result was jewellery that read as personal and characterful rather than as anonymous prestige work.

The 1943 financial difficulties

Flato's business collapsed in the early 1940s under a combination of war-time restrictions on precious-metal supply, deteriorating cash flow, and personal legal difficulties — Flato was convicted of pawning customer-owned jewellery and served time in federal prison in 1944. The salons closed, and Flato spent the post-war decades working in Mexico City under reduced circumstances, continuing to design until his death in 1999. The closure of the salons makes signed Flato work scarce: production was concentrated in the years 1928–1943, and surviving pieces with provenance to that period are highly collectable.

In the trade

Signed Flato pieces appear regularly at the major auction houses' jewellery sales — Christie's, Sotheby's, Bonhams, and Doyle in particular — and command premiums for the combination of provenance, scarcity, and design distinctiveness. Authentication relies on signed work, on cross-reference with the published photographic record of Flato's salon production (the standard reference is Elizabeth Irvine Bray's Paul Flato: Jeweler to the Stars, 2010), and on consistency with Flato's documented clientele. The trade values Flato as one of the small group of American twentieth-century designers whose work has cleared the threshold from mid-century commercial production into collectable signed jewellery, alongside Verdura, Schlumberger, and a handful of others.

Further reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — twentieth-century American jewellery articles
• International Gem Society — Hollywood jewellery and Flato reference
• Victoria and Albert Museum — twentieth-century jewellery holdings