Women's Diamond Cocktail Watches

Becoming wildly popular during the 1920s, the diamond cocktail watch came to epitomize the Art Deco period in jewelry. Art Deco proved to be a perfect fit with the Roaring Twenties era of jazz, gangsters, and Prohibition. In the 1920s, daring Flapper girls drank and smoked in speakeasies wearing opulent diamond cocktail watches, long pearl necklaces, and carrying cigarette cases and powder compacts – the so-called “nécessaires de soirs.”

The major jewelry houses of the day, including Tiffany, Boucheron, Cartier, and Van Cleef & Arpels, created iconic diamond cocktail watches to appeal to the new independent strong woman of the '20s. They were geometric in design and encrusted with diamonds, with jolts of color from rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.

Quick Facts

• In 1939, Tiffany featured spectacular diamond cocktail watches in its “House of Jewels” exhibit at the New York World's Fair
• The Art Deco diamond cocktail watch underwent a recent revival with the huge popularity of “The Great Gatsby” and “Downton Abbey”
• At $40 million, the Graff Diamonds “Fascination” is the world’s most expensive diamond cocktail watch, with a total of 152.96 of exceptional quality white diamonds