006: WE'RE WEARING BROOCHES NOW
The piece that unlocked my love of pins, plus tips on where to find the very best ones
When Diane Keaton died last fall, a lot of fashionable people I know rewatched Annie Hall, quietly plotting their menswear-inspired Halloween homage. But for me, the rewatch was always going to be Baby Boom. It’s long been my style north star, both for the sublime New York apartment, with its Noguchi lamps and Frank Stella acrylics, and for the incredible costuming. I have no real desire to dress like Keaton’s character; I’ve never worn a nipped-waist skirt suit, nor could I ever look anything but ridiculous in a polka-dot pussy bow blouse. And yet the way Keaton dresses in Baby Boom is aspirational because it represents the kind of confidence and surety in your own innate sense of style that I’ve always aspired to.
When I fired up the movie this time around, however, I realized there was one piece of her look that I needed to cop immediately (aside from the Robert Mallet-Stevens kitchen chairs I’ve been thinking about buying for months). In the scene where she goes to a maple syrup Vermont hoedown to flirt with Sam Shepard’s character, she’s wearing a suede, monochrome blouse and belted skirt combo, cinched at the collar with a silver brooch depicting two slightly abstracted parrots. The character actually has a very strong Taxco-inspired silver jewelry game throughout the film, but this was the piece that made me straighten up, march over to my TV, take a snapshot, and feed it directly into Google Lens. To my surprise, an exact match popped up on eBay. I had never bought a brooch in my entire adult life. I purchased it immediately.
Brooches are the kind of thing that frequently go in and out of style, but they’ve been on the upswing for a while — so much so that they were cited by Pinterest last month as one of the biggest upcoming trends for 2026, a designation that normally would have me running for the hills. I’d never caught the bug myself, but when my parrot brooch arrived, it unlocked something. Suddenly I was buying another tasseled brooch from COS complete with matching necklace, and doing research on Vivianna Torun, a 1950s-era silversmith who designed jewelry for Georg Jensen and housewares for Dansk. I was looking up old Sight Unseen articles about jewelry by architects, wondering if it might yield some excellent examples, and trawling my LiveAuctioneers “modernist silver” results for stick pins. I was saving images of a brooch-heavy look from the Versace SS26 collection, and envisioning myself brooch-maxxing in the mode of Joni Mitchell. I met a Milanese publicist at the Dedar x Anni Albers press preview in New York who was wearing a very fun safety pin–shaped brooch and immediately DMed the designer to send me images. In other words, I was doing the kind of obsessive research I normally reserve for design objects (and that now usually results in a newsletter theme).
Brooches, I found, are a particularly fun species to investigate. They can be quite polarizing, even to people who have never worn one, in part because they come with so much baggage — for many, brooches are the purview of monarchs and heads of state and other fusty old ladies, and for every stylish or interesting modernist piece on the secondary market, there are hundreds of weird Americana-tinged examples, or things like gold bejeweled cats. When done well, though, a brooch can do a lot of the heavy lifting in an outfit. That’s often the role of any piece of statement jewelry, but brooches exude a kind of self-possession that doesn’t necessarily come with wearing a statement necklace. They say things like I’m not afraid to poke a hole in this expensive shirt or Ask me about this thing on my chest.
In my research, I found I was most drawn, unsurprisingly, to Modernist mid-century brooches, or new ones that approximated the look of those. In furniture, I’m often more drawn to work from the 1970s, Deco-y stuff from the ‘30s, or radical work from the ‘80s but mid-century was such a sweet spot for silversmithing. There’s a seemingly endless trove of vintage Mexican silver brooches from that time online (as BBSP has pointed out!), plus it’s fun to look at the Calders and Bertoias that sell for bonkers amounts.
But I maybe never knew that the postwar Danish designer Nanna Ditzel also designed tons of brooches for Georg Jensen? (Which are plentiful online, though on the pricier side.) And I loved reading about the pioneering silversmith Vivianna Torun, who essentially invented the modern idea of jewelry. There’s a great profile online of Torun worth reading, written by Ilse Crawford: “From the very beginning, [Torun] was at odds with her times, with the dressy, showy school of jewelry, with the idea of jewelry as status. She worked with silver because it was a material “from which I can coax a fluid, curving movement.” … For Torun, jewelry was about the basic human need for ritual embellishment. “I dream of making jewelry that is so near to being feminine that you wear it all the time, you live with it on”—pieces to be worn for hanging out the washing as well as for special occasions.”
When I debuted my brooches at design events in the fall, they were delightful conversation starters. But to find out even more about Living With Brooches, I turned to a friend who’s basically been the design world’s ambassador to the brooch industry for several years now: Dan Rubinstein, a former editor at Departures and Surface who’s now the podcasting guru behind The Grand Tourist. Whenever I see Dan at a design party, he always has some dapper mid-century accessory on his lapel, and I asked how he started getting into them.
“I was trying to collect art online at the time, and I had a hard time finding what I wanted. But I always found a brooch that I wanted. And I was like, OK, I live in a New York City apartment with very little room. But you can own a hundred brooches and just put them in a shoebox. It was nice because buying brooches was giving me the sensation that I was buying art or design.
“I go to a lot of formal events, and brooches are fun and easy to wear. You don’t need to buy a loud jacket. You can just buy something very functional or universal and then put whatever you want on it, depending on your mood — you can take it more modern, more artful, more kooky, more somber or neutral. Madeline Albright, the former secretary of state — she had symbolism in her brooch choice. If she was going to see someone she thought was evil, she’d wear a spider. Mine are so abstract, they wouldn’t mean anything. They’re more like, this is how I feel today.
“I have a Dior one that I’ve never worn. It’s got a little dangly pearl and a fake jewel and it says “J’adore” on it, which at the time, I was like, yeah, I can wear that! And now I’m like, no. I have to be feeling extremely gay and festive for this one. My go-to is mid-century modern without stones — they’re more about shape, very simple and sculptural and geometric. And they don’t use gold. They typically use sterling or pewter. They’re a bit more masculine and they’re more neutral.
“My rule is I won’t go above $300, but I will buy a whole lot from an estate sale just to get one that I like. You have to be willing to sift through hundreds of them. There’s a Finnish site I use called Nordlings, and I also use Invaluable. I’ll search, like, “brooch” and there will be 400 examples. It’s not really about search terms. It’s about just looking and looking and looking.”
The TL;DR? If you’re new to brooching, I hope you’ll use this letter as a guide to help you begin your journey, and maybe even buy your first one. But don’t be surprised if you have to wait for a Baby Boom moment of your very own. 👀
TIPS FOR SOURCING—& STYLING—BROOCHES
Search mainstream auction sites, like Rago or Bukowski’s, to familiarize yourself with the names of artists who have dabbled in brooches, then plug those names into Google. That’s what led me to Auerbach & Maffia, an online gallery specializing in modernist jewelry that has a trove of great pins, like this squared-off spiral by Ed Wiener, this ‘90s Postmodern sterling brooch by Israeli artist Orna Ben Ami, or this one, with a tiny amber cabochon, from Danish artist Nile Erik.
Learn the word for brooch in other languages and head to other, country-specific auction platforms. I typed “spilla modernista” into ebay.it and it fired back with this spiral silver number, this 70s-era twisted sphere, this Spratling-esque sunburst in need of a polish.
On the topic of brooch-maxxing: This is an area that interests me but frankly makes me nervous. Opportunities abound for this to go very awry! But I think it has the potential to make brooches a little less fussy, and Joni had the right idea: Start with several variations on a single theme to make it seem like an intentional collection and not like you accessorized in the dark. In an ideal world, simply grouping vintage pieces in the same material should work, like in this editorial at Front General Store, but tread lightly. A Whimsical World recently had a good brooch-styling tutorial!
I’m generally not very interested in brooch interpretations by big fashion brands, but I would make an exception for this Wales Bonner one, and, weirdly, this bi-color Japanese wool Tory Burch cardigan that comes with a split sleeve that can wrap around like a scarf, fastened by a tulip-shaped brooch.
Vintage Brooch Dump
Gilt and enamel brooch by Norwegian designer Oystein Balle, looks like a beautiful blue sea cracker, €275
Gorgeous Nanna Ditzel for Georg Jensen silver clamshell with inset pearl, $447
Sterling silver disc with onyx orb by Nanna Ditzel for Georg Jensen, $725
Thick, stamped asymmetrical brooch by Nanna Ditzel for Georg Jensen, $495
Undulating silver brooch with petal flaps by Grete Prytz Kittelsen, $490
Buglike sterling silver brooch by Carl Ove Frydensberg, $180
Tough two-toned crumpled brooch with 18K gold hoop by Lena Munthe, $393
Independent Designer Brooch Dump
Zoé Mohm sterling silver safety pin brooch with hand-woven basket, $365
Expressive, biomorphic Esha Soni brooch in sterling silver ($480) or gold vermeil ($580)
THE KITCHEN SINK
If you’re still on the hunt for Cunty Little Cutlery Sets™, I found another gorgeous one by Corali that fits the bill in that it’s made by a jeweler ✔️ from a recycled precious metal ✔️ would cost four figures to complete the set ✔️
I’m very invested in finding the perfect pen — my current fave is the Sakura Pigma Micron .05, thanks to a tip from a friend who’s also an extremely exacting industrial designer. I was interested to try these Japanese “Magic” pens via Leigh at Moon Lists, but they’re currently sold out. You can find them here if you haven’t washed your hands of Amazon, or here if you’re in the UK.
I wanted to include these sand-cast aluminum or bronze candlesticks by Kassandra Thatcher in The Counter Space Guide to Gifting, but it didn’t fit into either rubric. They’re such a perfect size and shape.
Do I need to do a kitchen round-up? I find this one by UK interior designer Hollie Bowden to be so inspiring. Those yellow cast-glass pendants… oof.
Your picks are so amazing and now I want a brooch!!