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At Australian Fashion Week in mid-May, attendees went hard on embellishments. The trend that emerged on recent runways and red carpets has made its way to the fashion set, and to the streets: outside the Carriageworks art centre, fashion week-goers adorned their bags with vibrant charms and pinned playful brooches atop jumpers and blazers.
Earlier this year, embellishments appeared on the SS24 and AW24 runways. Both Tory Burch and Erdem showed an array of brooches, while Coach and Balenciaga offered up charm-heavy bags. Miu Miu, a brand on a roll, delivered both.
Momentum built with the red carpet treatment. At the Met Gala, designer Willy Chavarria and Saks CEO Marc Metrick wore blazers complete with giant rosettes; Mike Faist donned a Loewe turnip; and Jeff Goldblum’s lapel featured a wonderful assortment of trinkets. Last week at Cannes Film Festival, Sienna Miller wore a Schiaparelli double-anatomy brooch (part of a full look), while Margaret Qualley jazzed up an oversized hat with a Chanel pin sculpted into a sprig of lavender. Some pin-on adornments adopted political meaning, as actors from Leïla Bekhti to Jasmine Trinca showed support for Palestine with flag and watermelon brooches.
Oftentimes, embellishment is fun and light-hearted — a light-lift way of personalising an otherwise generic look. Other times, it’s a means of communicating a stance: at New York Fashion Week, attendees pinned flag brooches to handbags. Embellishments are a simple way of communicating identity through fashion.
As ever, social media has a hand in all this. Besides the influence of runway collections, the trend is additionally fuelled by TikTokers using “Jane Birkinfy” handbags to express and develop personal aesthetics, says Kayla Marci, senior analyst at EDITED. “Jane Birkin bag” currently sits at 122.3 million posts. On Pinterest, searches for bag charms are up 274 per cent year-on-year; antique brooches are up 27 per cent.
For Lori Hirshleifer, buyer and owner of New York retailer Hirshleifers (with an Instagram profile photo that features a charm-adorned Birkin), it’s a medium for displaying her collection of trinkets. “I’ve always been a collector of things — pins, charms, jewellery — I think the bag charms are just an extension of that,” she says. Hirshleifer puts the current moment down to a mix of nostalgia and runway newness. “I think Miu Miu is to thank for that at this point in time, but people like Jane Birkin have always mixed high and low with accessorising.”