For the love of brooches
I am an accessory person and when I say accessory, I don’t mean a huge bangle with a popping snake head on it. I mean meaningful subtle strategically positioned accessories. A nice neck scarf, barely three bangles that speak to your wrist, an arty set of earrings, a bespoke necklace, a vintage brooch. Fashionistas the world over understand the less is more mantra for the best fashion forward moments. A bogus necklace and dangling earrings the size of a ball does not make you fashionable. It makes you cheap. Too much sparkly in the daytime makes you gaudy, a headgear the size of a storey building on the news makes your “gele” the content rather than your words. Paired down fashion is more difficult to achieve than piling on all your jewellery in one day. This is classic fashion is an attitude and takes a lot more training, subtlety, artiness, to achieve. Wearing everything at once to show all the money you have in one day is quite easy to do.
I have always loved how accessories can change the entire outlook of a simple dress. A plain uninteresting dress suddenly takes a new life with a brooch. A brooch can hold together a dress threatening to reveal too much. These days a brooch would add value to an ordinary turban converting it to top-level fashion item and you the belle of the ball.
When a brooch is on a woman it confers on her a status of timeliness, elegance, class and style. If the brooch is vintage or tells a story, it further elevates her to iconic status, a style role model especially if she wears it well; on a collar, to the top left hand corner of a collarless dress or blouse. I have been known to use a brooch as a cinch on a silk dress or accessorise an entire blouse (plain and collarless) with six identical bug like brooches to create texture. I have been known to use brooches as buttons on a dress that came without buttons or even over the buttons to create the requisite oomph!
The more old school they look, sans colour, the better the bugs look on the dress. A red blouse would take these bugs or a plain white one and a black one too. Tip: Black dresses more than any other colour take the brooches better than any other. Brooches, if they are small have in the past formed the lower border of a not so stellar blouse or become a pendant to an ordinary chain. My love of brooches piqued as I grew older and I collect brooches from far flung places around the world. My brooches are often one of a kind, single pieces that become personal to me.
My brooch collection is very interesting. I have a firefly and a blue butterfly from Australia and I have a red swarovsi bird from Austria. My eternal collections of flowered brooches in all the colours of the rainbow have come from top level jewellery makers in India. I have a silver alligator, a sparkly unicorn and bespoke designs from across the world including a yellow spider and a blue tortoise. I have received an innumerable number of brooch gifts from shops in Abuja and Lagos. I have a vintage collection and a street collection bought from all manners of people at train stations, in vintage stores and at fashion fairs. One of my favourite is a to-die-for diamond brooch from Hong Kong.
Where a brooch sits matters and these days I am incensed by a generation younger who have neither studied fashion history nor understood vintage. Style is losing its appeal and now its trends and TV influences of grunge and Kanye West infused fashion. This has to be the reason brooches are now been worn on one breast. So I watch closely and the big butterfly or bug or flower is sitting smack on the wearer’s breast like an attraction totem, certain to kill me and other on-lookers.
Miss, please could you explain why you chose that part of your anatomy to place an item that would otherwise have enhanced your fashion if it was not in the wrong place …breast, nipple, what is the plan? As a brooch aficionado, I have an unspoken mantra that if worn well I commend and if worn in an offending way, I call you aside and relocate.
I am not the only one with a brooch bug. Former American Secretary of state Madeline Albright was so well bitten by the brooch bug that she simply wrote a book about it expressing her brooch stories.
In her book, “Read My Pins” she provides a look at her life through the brooches she wore. Her collection is both international and democratic-dime-store pins share pride of place with designer creations and family heirlooms. Included are the antique eagle purchased to celebrate Albright’s appointment as secretary of state, the zebra pin she wore when meeting Nelson Mandela, and the Valentine’s Day heart forged by Albright’s five-year-old daughter. The book comes with illustrations, humorous stories about jewellery, global politics, and the life of one of America’s most accomplished and fascinating diplomats. If she were to meet a perceived enemy of America for instance, she wore a lion, hyena or viper but if she were meeting an ally, she wore a Dove or Butterfly or a horse. I hear you Madame Albright. All for the love of brooches…Art, style, life stories.
Eugenia Abu