M
ale adornment is in vogue again — at recent red carpet events, pins have been spotted on many an A-list lapel. Their roots lie in the jabot pin, with which men secured a lace ruffle to the front of their shirts in the 17th and 18th centuries. During the early art deco period of the Twenties, they would be revived by jewellery houses such as Cartier, which also took inspiration from the turban pins of its newly acquired Indian royal clientele. Rock crystal, onyx and carved emerald beads characterised these creations with a decorative element set at each end.
Today, the British jeweller Glenn Spiro’s first unisex collection includes a series of seven pins using materials such as ebony, horn and (west African) Baoulé gold mixed with antique diamonds. Boucheron has looked to its archive for the arrow motif, whose design naturally fits a pin’s construction, here morphing from brooch to single earring. And Dior has gone punk — its take comes in the form of the humble safety pin strung with charms in new iterations from the maison’s Rose des Vents collection — while Chaumet’s diamond-set signature bee sits at one end of a gold pin, with a single cell of honeycomb in the shape of a hexagonal diamond at the other.
