Widely considered stodgy and trite, brooches have been seriously
out of fashion ever since the power-suit-ridden “Dynasty” years. Grandmothers
have drawers full of them. Catherine O’Hara, playing the loony Moira Rose on “Schitt’s
Creek,” wears them incessantly — even when going to bed.
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Jewelers rarely list them on their e-commerce shopping menus
(but they do sell them). And from the 1950s through the ‘80s, they acquired a
reputation “as daytime, luncheon jewels,” said Marion Fasel, a fine-jewelry
historian. Who, if anyone, has lunched since the ‘80s?
All of this means, of course, that the brooch is ripe for a
revival.
In the 2020s, “it’s men who are in charge of making brooches
cool again,” Fasel said. Regé-Jean Page showed up on “Saturday Night Live” last
month wearing an Alexander McQueen suit that came with three pearl brooches
sewn onto the lapel. Jared Leto chose a huge, corsage-y Gucci brooch at the
Golden Globes, where Anthony Anderson went for a Chopard flower.
At the Grammys, Trevor Noah wore the Tiffany-Schlumberger
gold-spiked, diamond-studded Apollo brooch, and DaBaby went for a diamond DG
pin on his Dolce & Gabbana jacket, only to switch to a Chanel jacket
affixed with a diamond C on each lapel.
A number of brooches today are marketed specifically to men, and
they’re different from the dainty, ladylike pins of the past. The McQueen lily
brooch in antique silver not only looks slightly past its prime, but also, on
close inspection, as noted by New York gem dealer and jewelry historian
Benjamin Zucker, has minuscule skulls and crossbones atop its pistils. He
described the piece as “ominous and arresting.”
A Gucci cotton brooch labeled Embroidered Hare — technically, it’s
mostly crocheted — evokes handicrafts, yet on the company website it’s attached
to the business suit lapel of a young male model. For Victoria Pass, an
associate professor of fashion history at the Maryland Institute College of Art
in Baltimore, “brooches like these can change the whole look of a masculine
tailored suit, turning it into something more gender fluid.”
“Here is a new way for men to express themselves,” said Carlton
Jones, a designer and stylist in New York. “Brooches have begun to be that
statement. There’s going to be a 360 from the super-casual quarantine dressing
that we’ve become so comfortable with.”
Karen Davidov founded Jewelry Library, a New York gallery,
research center and gathering spot that will hold a monthlong online brooch
exhibit, with speaker events, this May. “Men in brooches make us look at the
form itself in a fresh new way,” she said.
The Gaga factor
If celebrity men don’t make brooches’ resurgence clear enough,
consider the surreally sized, 20cm repousse gilded brass Schiaparelli dove,
bearing an olive branch, that Lady Gaga wore at the presidential inauguration
in January. As she stepped up to the rostrum and sang the national anthem, the
applique-like dove, custom fitted to her bust, quivered slightly: as if coming
alive, as if Gaga herself was taking flight.
“She wanted something iconic. Something emblematic of the
moment,” said Daniel Roseberry, creative director of Schiaparelli. He designed
the dove to be worn on the left, near her heart.
“A dove carrying an olive branch. May we all make peace with
each other,” Gaga later said.
Not that anyone misunderstood. “Gaga is there to make
statements, and that’s exactly what she did,” Jones said. As well as putting
the world on notice that the brooch is back.
“Finally, the world of fashion has realized the importance of a
piece of jewelry as a ‘messenger’ of large subjects such as love, peace, unity,
friendship and devotion,” Nichka Marobin, an art historian viewing the
inauguration from Padua, Italy, wrote in an email.
Rings, earrings, bracelets and necklaces necessarily interact
with fingers, earlobes, wrists and throat, posing limitations on the jeweler.
But “a brooch is independent of the body,” said Lori Ettlinger Gross, a jewelry
historian in New York. Like a painting or sculpture, it’s a nonverbal
statement, a small sandwich board — as the brooch-wearing diplomat Madeleine
Albright has repeatedly demonstrated, strategically wielding pieces from her
sizable collection first as ambassador to the United Nations and then as
secretary of state.
She wore a giant bug pin after Russians were caught
eavesdropping on the State Department, and an arrowlike pin when renegotiating
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Asked by the foreign minister if it was a
missile interceptor, her response was, “Yes. We make them very small.”
And that was before the age of social media. As Kristen
Ingersoll, a stylist in New York, succinctly put it, “These days, a brooch is
better than a tweet.”
‘The Romance of the Past’
Like Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli, Alessandro Michele,
creative director of Gucci, focuses on jewelry. With his
aristocratic-bohemian-more-is-more-geek-chic proclivities, and the inspiration
he gets from his sizable antique and vintage jewelry collection, Michele has
turned out season after season of attention-grabbing brooches that cavort all
over jewelry history.
His schoolgirl-on-steroids striped grosgrain bows, embellished
with golden bees and ornate centerpiece pins that drew attention a few seasons
ago? “Edwardian,” said Ilene Chazanof, an antiques dealer in New York, without
hesitation. The Double G Monogram Pin, surrounded with crystals, from his
latest collection? “Georgian influenced.” The riotous Marmont Fringe Brooch
from the same collection? “A Persian-Jaipur-Middle Eastern-Tibetan pastiche.”
Already back in 2015, Michele began showing embroidered
appliqués — crossovers between brooches and clothing — to pin or sew onto his
ready-to-wear. Floral ones were strewn all over the sheer Oscar de la Renta
minidress that Taylor Swift wore at the Grammys, and in Simone Rocha’s fall
2021 collection.
Deanna Farneti Cera, a jewelry historian in Milan, said: “He has
chosen not to address his work to well-heeled older women or men, but to
millennials, which shows great intuition.” These young people, she said, “are a
new kind of customer, who need to find their identity in something not seen
before, at least not in their lifetime.”
That something, suggested Keith Penton, head of the jewelry
department at Christie’s in London, is “the romance of the past.”
Dena Giannini, style director of British Vogue, said, “Michele
has such a knack for remixing the old in a new way.” Giannini noted that with
him, “it’s all about the piling on.”
Hope in a pin
The baubles have lately been gaining in popularity on e-commerce
sites. Giannini attributes this “to millennials and Gen Zers moving away from
fast fashion and seeking integrity as they upcycle and recycle.”
The most sought-after decade? For clients of Susan Caplan, a
luxury vintage jewelry specialist in London, it’s the dress-for-success 1980s,
when Armani, Versace, Lagerfeld and Lacroix had arrived. Chanel’s boldest
pieces appeared. Van Cleef & Arpels designers moonlighted for Trifari, a
costume jewelry company, while Monet, Trifari’s competitor, produced
triple-gold-plated brooches for Yves Saint Laurent — “perfect for his sharp
shoulders that were almost billboards,” Ettlinger Gross said.
According to Fasel, most people think of the 1980s as an era of
big-statement jewels. “But when it comes to brooches, JAR made pieces that have
withstood the test of time,” she said. “He did a whole series of butterfly
brooches in his signature pave-setting with precious and semiprecious stones.”
(JAR is Joel Arthur Rosenfeld, the American-in-Paris fine jeweler known by his
initials.)
Flooding the market right now are pins, some as small as
fingertips, displaying every personage imaginable — including Dr. Anthony
Fauci. Wearing them not only tells others whom we favor, but it is also a way
of keeping them close and sharing their powers.
Among the most touching are the embellished photo portraits of
the late Cicely Tyson, in ornate frames. They’re part of the Afro-Luminaries
collection of pins by Ashaka Givens, a milliner and designer in Brooklyn. The
Tyson pins quickly have become bestsellers, along with the Nina Simones and
James Baldwins.
Especially riveting among all the smalls is a vectorlike enamel
pin in the shape of a syringe, displaying the words “THANKS, SCIENCE” front and
center, from an outfit called Dissent Pins. As a bonus, the pin’s sleek design
recalls Mondrian’s rectangles and squares.
“It has a tremendous life,” Zucker said. “I think of it as
heading upwards, expressing hope. I just love it.”