LaBizarreSusu is an independent online boutique specializing in antique and vintage jewelry, silverware, decorative arts, and collectibles, primarily from 1880 to 1980. The collection has been formed over years of searching, studying, and trading antique pieces, and continues to grow in the same way: piece by piece.
Most are one-of-a-kind pieces. Rings, brooches, earrings, bracelets, pendants, cameos, lockets, reliquaries, and silverware arrive from different eras and places, and each one poses its own questions. Before adding an item to the collection, we try to understand what is in front of us, how it is made, what era it might belong to, and what information the piece itself retains.
Our specialization spans a good part of a century of jewelry: from the Victorian period and late 19th-century Aestheticism, Arts & Crafts, Belle Époque, Art Nouveau and Modernisme, the Edwardian era and Art Déco, through 1940s Retro jewelry, Mid-Century, mid-20th-century design, and vintage jewelry from the 1960s and 1970s, with a special interest in certain firms, designers, and pieces linked to postwar Modernism and Brutalism.
Dates and styles help to organize and understand the pieces, but they rarely function as exact boundaries. Influences coexisted, traveled, and evolved differently depending on the country, the maker, and the moment.
How we study each piece
One of the things that interests us most about antique jewelry is learning to read what the piece itself tells us.
A setting, a clasp, the way the metal is worked, a manufacturing technique, materials, a signature, a hallmark, or a stamp can provide clues about its origin and chronology. Wear, an old repair, a transformation, or any peculiarity of its construction also matter.
That is why each piece is examined individually. We investigate marks and references that may be relevant, compare their characteristics with available documentation, and gather the information that allows us to place it, with the greatest possible rigor, in its era and context.
Not all antique jewels retain a signature, legible hallmarks, original documentation, or a known provenance. In each item description, we try to clearly differentiate what can be documented, what can be directly observed, and the degree of certainty of an attribution.
Measurements, materials, techniques, marks and hallmarks, state of preservation, chronology, and any other detail that helps to understand the piece are part of the cataloging.
What a jewel tells about its era
But there is a part of this work that goes beyond identifying materials, dates, or makers, and it is probably one of the most fascinating aspects: understanding what these pieces were used for and what they might have meant to the people who lived with them.
Jewels have not only been adornments. They have served to remember, mourn, woo, celebrate, show social standing, express belonging, follow a trend, and even reflect political and social changes.
A locket could preserve a portrait or a lock of hair of a loved one. Flowers, animals, hands, hearts, snakes, and other motifs participated, at certain times and in certain contexts, in different symbolic languages. Some jewels were related to new ways of dressing and understanding identity, while others preserved much older traditions and codes.
The same is true for many of the collectibles that pass through LaBizarreSusu. A dance card, a silver mesh bag, a powder compact, a cigarette case, a vanity item, or a small desk accessory may seem strange today, yet it had a perfectly recognizable function in the daily life of its time.
Investigating these uses allows us to better understand the objects and also the people who used them: how they related, how they dressed, what they carried with them, what they considered intimate or public, and how customs—and especially the lives of women—changed between the late 19th and the 20th century.
When that context is relevant to a piece, we try to incorporate it into its description. Always with the same caution: knowing the historical meaning of a symbol or use does not mean we can automatically attribute that intention to a specific specimen. Documented context and the particular history of a piece are different things.
For us, that is where much of the fascination of working with antique objects lies: not only finding out what they are and when they are from, but trying to understand why they existed, how they were used, and what they tell us about their time.
The real piece, with all its details
The photographs always correspond to the specific piece that is for sale. We strive to show it from different angles and include reverses, clasps, settings, marks, hallmarks, and those details that help to understand its construction and condition.
A jewel that has existed for decades—and sometimes more than a century—may retain signs of use, repairs, or modifications. When they are relevant, they are part of the description because they are also part of the history of the piece.
If, before purchasing, you need to check a measurement, see a mark or hallmark in greater detail, or ask about any aspect of its condition, you can write to us. The pieces that appear in LaBizarreSusu pass through our hands, and we know them firsthand.
A collection that is also an archive
Sold pieces do not lose their interest when they find a new owner either. Together with the available collection, they form an archive of antique and vintage jewelry, silverware, decorative arts, and collectibles that reflects years of searching and direct contact with pieces from different eras, origins, and techniques.
Each piece leaves something behind: a mark to investigate, an unusual construction, a maker to get to know, a symbol to interpret, a use that had disappeared, or a reference that leads to another.
That accumulated knowledge then returns to the new pieces that arrive at LaBizarreSusu.
Purchase and shipping
LaBizarreSusu offers direct assistance before and after the purchase. Orders are carefully prepared and are normally dispatched within 24–48 business hours, via tracked services. You can consult the shipping information and delivery times here.
LaBizarreSusu brings together antique and vintage jewelry, silverware, decorative arts, and objects with a history, selected, studied, and cataloged piece by piece.
