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
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Counter Space to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.