A brooch comeback
Garrard recently reported that it was selling lots of brooches again, to both men and women. The red carpet has been influential in this revival, with male celebrities adding some sparkle to their tuxedos. While the brooch’s return in women’s fashion has been a slow burner, winter tailoring offers the opportunity for an antique jewel to brighten up a lapel.
Isabel Marant’s tweed blazers featured multiple trinkets swinging from bar brooches, while Toga, a Japanese brand showing in London, pinned an assortment of big sparkly stars onto tweed and furry jackets. Miu Miu made a bolder pitch with large vintage-style rose-shaped brooches in gold, which it pinned to fur stoles and knitwear for a slightly skewed ’40s and ’50s look with conical bras. It was brand founder Miuccia Prada’s aim to bring the feminine back into fashion; as she remarked after the show, she sees these elements as “the typical accessories of femininity: the bra, the brooches, the fur.”
Mega-pearls
Lustrous white pearls are ballooning in size, heralding an opportunity to revive South Sea pearl necklaces and drop earrings.
Large strings of pearls appeared on the catwalk of Irish designer Sinead Gorey, who styled them with tartan, leather and corsets for an edgy clubland look. Fashion-jewelry brand CompletedWorks presented a hilarious retro parody of a television shopping channel circa the 1950s, starring actress Debi Mazar in an enormous double-row pearl choker. Some of its pieces upped the scale by twisting a row of seed pearls around bigger South Sea specimens. Golf-ball-sized pearls dangled from the lobes of models at Huishan Zhang, accompanying pinstripe pantsuits and ’60s-style brocade evening gowns.
However, it was Chanel that really pumped up the pearl volume, with a cross-body string graduating from a 1-inch diameter at the shoulder to 4 inches at the hip, and two extra-long rows of pearls on the brand’s double-C chains atop oversized sweaters and knitted pantsuits.
Jewels as clothing
Sarah Burton’s debut collection for Givenchy at the autumn-winter shows in Paris looked beyond the brand’s familiar association with Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Through the black-and-white photos of Hubert de Givenchy’s 1952 debut, she reconnected the couture house with its founder in a collection of sharply tailored pieces with big gravity-defying leather bows and swooping dresses. Burton’s showstopper piece was a jeweled top that took its inspiration from the chandelier in de Givenchy’s salon; she imagined it having crashed to the floor, and herself repurposing its sparkling elements to create the top and the collection’s jewelry.
The idea of jewelry as part of the clothing rather than an accessory was one that threaded through a few of the autumn collections in Paris and Milan. The Givenchy piece was a loose assembly of huge crystal pendants, briolettes, pearls and multicolored paste jewels, with other chandelier elements taking the form of earrings. Prada, meanwhile, stitched jeweled necklaces onto detached knitted collars for a high-low look, and adorned the collars of full knitted tops with the kinds of large jeweled charms that might dangle from a handbag.
Of course, stitching jewelry onto clothes goes back at least as far as the Renaissance and the Tudors. Queen Elizabeth I’s dresses had thousands of pearls sewn on, while the maharajas wore clothes embroidered with precious gems. The Renaissance served as an inspiration for Dolce & Gabbana, which appliquéd jeweled emblems and motifs onto cargo pants and satin minidresses to create casual couture looks.
Neck statements
The lasting impression the autumn fashion collections gave was of a more refined, sophisticated, tailored look, with several collections evoking a neat ’50s or ’60s vibe. These are not the types of outfits that call for complicating the neckline with multiple fine chains; they invite a bolder statement, such as Schiaparelli’s emphatic chandelier-style bib necklace in gold and brass — which accented a body-hugging “snake scale” dress — or Alessandro Michele’s large shell pendants at Valentino. Roberto Cavalli designer Fausto Puglisi put a big cameo on a cord with a ’40s-style leather coat, and paired red devoré velvet dresses with necklaces of agate and volcanic pebbles.
Even Chloe, which has majored in the boho look of fine chains and chokers, stuck to big puffy heart pendants with charms attached, occasionally adding a shorter version for its satin lingerie dresses. And Louis Vuitton’s neckwear offering was a watch that could slip into a leather cover on a short chain — too short for the wearer to read the time, however; that’s what cellphones are for.
Main image: A model wears a string of supersized pearls at the Chanel fall-winter ’25 show. (Chanel)
