In these days of maximal glam, it’s a good choice to don a brooch to glow up an outfit. These little, or large, flourishes can be purely decorative or can signify deeper meaning.
“Oh gosh, brooches are less prescribed than a ring or a pair of earrings!” says Edmonton fine jewelry maker Kelty Pelechytik. “You can wear them on a jacket or a dress or a scarf or a bag; it becomes how you style yourself.”
In medieval times a brooch showed its wearer’s social status. But trying to figure out who your equal was got murkier as the lower classes got richer and uppity enough to sartorially blur class lines. In response, sumptuary laws took hold in England, aimed to make class distinctions obvious by spelling out what jewelry various classes were legally allowed to wear. But the writing was on the wall.
After this, the brooch as a signifier started getting fun. Tudor-era nobles wore pins with miniature portraits of loved ones. Victorians in mourning wore brooches that incorporated the hair of their dead loved ones. Regency-era travellers bragged about trips to the continent via brooches featuring tiny paintings of tourist destinations. In the First World War, sweetheart brooches took on military ornamentation when soldiers gifted them before shipping out.
More recently, debunked rumors that Queen Elizabeth II sent secret messages via her brooches blew up the internet during the first U.S. presidential visit in the late 2010s. But to paraphrase jewelry historian Lauren Kiehna, the Queen wore a brooch because the Queen wears brooches.
“I see girls as young as 11 or 12 buying brooches to collect,” says Marta Sams, owner of Anything And Everything Vintage in St. Albert. She says that especially collectable are mid-century brooches, including those made by Gustave Sherman of Montreal.
It’s valuable to have a complete Sherman set of multiple pieces, she says, but these are rare. “They were often separated as keepsakes for family members,” she says. And modern wearers might feel like it’s too much to sport all of these pieces at once. Sams says that instead, girls and young women will incorporate a Sherman brooch into an outfit, pinned to a belt or handbag. Sherman designed with Swarovski and other Austrian crystals, often in floral, shrimp-tail or wreath-shaped designs. Serious collectors look for reds, but Sams says most vintage buyers will choose the colour and design that appeals to their personal style.
Men have always worn pins, too. Think of subtle signifiers like Martin Short’s often-present Order of Canada pin. More recently men have been sporting everything from decorative large straight lapel pins, often with an oversized flower at the top, to the intricate brooches of style icon Coleman Domingo.
Pelechytik says that there has been a shift away from jewelry whose chief function is to signal value towards pieces that feel discovered or collected. It’s part of the reason she buys antique cut diamonds to make her high-end jewelry, where some of the value lies in the skills of a master lapidary [gem cutter] of generations past.
While Pelechytik is a longtime jewelry maker, she recently made her first brooch for a friend of hers in Vancouver, Pamela Guenther. The piece is a pink sapphire heart held by an eagle, “The brooch signifies clarity of vision, healing, and love from and of others and self,” Guenther says. “Kelty paid attention to every detail, including placing the tiniest old-cut diamond as the eagle’s eye for clear sight.”
Her sister gifted her the piece, which can also be worn as a pendant, after more than a year of gruelling cancer treatments for Guenther. “This amazing brooch celebrates the conclusion of active treatment and the physical, mental and emotional journey that bonded and transformed us all,” Guenther says.
“Brooches have had this association with being traditional, but the way people wear jewelry now feels irreverent,” Pelechytik says. “You can put an antique diamond brooch on an oversized blazer or a T-shirt and suddenly it doesn’t feel ‘precious’ in the old-fashioned sense.”
Yours might have meaning to you, but today there’s no special reason to wear a brooch beyond the fact that they look great. Besides, queens wear brooches.
