KEIM Ltd Rhodium-plated Pewter Spiral Curl Dress Clip, good Vintage Art Deco 1930s / Retro 40s

Here is a real find - a beautiful spiral curl dress-clip, dating from around the late 1930s/early 1940s. This is a fabulous piece of Art Deco geometric design, transitioning into the later Retro style of the 1940s, an abstract curvy design worked in Rhodium-plated pewter. This is grey pewter colouron the back but very shiny chrome-colour on the front, and Rhodium was a very popular plating metal to use at this time.
This clip measures 6cms down x 4cms across (2 3/8" x 1 1/2") and has a good snap closing action - as good as it was when it was new. The base metal clip has the typical teeth to grip onto fabric without damaging it - I photographed it on the front of my fine-knit orange jumper and this was undamaged by it.

This is signed on the back of the clip with the word 'Keim Ltd London'. They made fabulously figurative dress clips like cherubs and birds in flight - and I have another large dress clip in the shape of a Knight chess piece, which is just as fabulous as this. I love this as it's so unusual and also a very strong design.

These were sold in high quality department stores and jeweller's, and they are quite interesting to search out if you can. They're very collectible indeed !! This one is lovely quality, and in excellent condition for its great age. It looks fantastic as a clip on the front of a top or dress, or simply clipped to the front of a T-shirt and worn with a jacket. This is a fabulous Retro/Art Deco treasure, and a really interesting and unusual piece.

KEIM Ltd of London
I haven't been able to discover much about this company, but here's what I have found:
Keim Ltd of London were a British costume jewellery manufacturer in the 1940s. They had a factory in London W1 at Fitzroy Works, 1 Conway Street. They exhibited at the 1947 British Industries Fair at Olympia where they were listed as Manufacturers of High Class Dress Accessories, Imitation Jewellery, Clip-on Earrings, Buttons, Buckles and Clasps.
Keim Ltd worked in Plastic, Base Metals and Silver and offered findings for jewellery too. They also made Leather Handbags and Ladies' Belts.

DRESS CLIPS
Dress clips on their own, were widely produced by companies such as Eisenberg, Miriam Haskell, and a number of others, but they're not always marked. Many were made of pot metal with no identifying markings present or overly distinctive characteristics, and these are all but impossible to attribute to a manufacturer. An abundance of this type of clip good was made from the mid 1920s to the early 1940s, and they're generally associated with the Art Deco era.

Larger dress clips like this were more frequently sold individually rather than as part of set. Some dress clips were sold in pairs, which could be worn at the corners of garments with square necklines.

Trifari and Coro, along with other unidentified manufacturers, were also known for making pairs of smallish clips held together in a specially designed mechanism allowing them to be worn together as a pin or separately as clips. Trifari patented their interlocking clip system as “Clip-mate,” while Coro patented a similar design as “Duette.” The generic name 'duette' has been used for quite some time among collectors as a catch-all term for this type of pin/clip duo.