Peter Demas often hears the compliment “Nice horns!” as he strolls through the streets of New York wearing a headband with two small silver-plated horns, a design by Vivienne Westwood.
“The metal band is underneath my hair, so the horns look like they are coming out of my head,” he said in a recent video call from his Brooklyn apartment. He was wearing the band, which he bought in March at Westwood’s Worlds End store in London, with a ’50s sleeveless white Minnie Mouse T-shirt and short black shorts.
The visual artist, 22, said he had been wearing the horns two or three times a month, sometimes to a party or to meet friends at Fanelli Cafe in the SoHo area of Lower Manhattan. He said that was because the piece — which sold for 185 pounds ($235) and which the brand calls an Alice band, referring to the headband on Alice in the John Tenniel illustrations for “Through the Looking Glass” — makes him feel “cool and more fashionable and I felt, like, it gave me more of an edge, even though I feel like I already look very distinct.”
Why is jewelry in the shape of horns expected to be so fashion forward this fall?
Horn pendants filtered through the fall 2024 catwalk shows. For example, Givenchy accessorized a little black dress with a $690 horn pendant made of brass and Isabel Marant dressed up her opening look with a $490 brass pendant made with buffalo horn.
But variations with unconventional designs or unusual materials have widened the horn’s appeal.
Consider the chic industrial style developed by Rainbow K, the Parisian brand of Kelly Souied and Kelia Toledano. Their design turned the horn into a kind of closure pin for sleek pieces such as a 14-karat gold ring with a horn in pavé diamonds (3,890 euros, or $4,245).
There has been the gold two-prong Danger Horn, the central element for a pearl necklace, ring, bracelet or earrings from the Japanese brand Tasaki (prices on application). And the semiprecious alternatives by the Italian twins Grazia and Marica Vozza, which included malachite, rhodonite and turquoise resin beads in a 36-inch necklace with a malachite horn pendant ($4,025).
The New York designer Alexis Bittar added pavé crystals to his Solanales horn necklace ($295) to look like “the pavé was pouring on top of the horn,” he said.
And in July Rosanne Karmes, the designer and founder of the Los Angeles brand Sydney Evan, introduced horn pendants of petrified wood that, fossilized, had become as hard as stone. When the wood was cut, inside there “are all different shades of beige, brown, chocolate brown,” she said, so “you can never have two exactly the same.” ($2,775 for just the two-inch pendant)
She also intends to experiment with what she called “fun colors,” such as turquoise.
Since the Stone Age
While the horn shape has looked largely the same since its Stone Age beginnings, its meaning has changed significantly over time.
“The horn shape is representative of a vessel,” said Karen Bachmann, an adjunct assistant professor of jewelry design at the Fashion Institute of Technology and a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, both in New York. “And one of the earliest representations of the horn shape can be seen in a Paleolithic limestone in the Dordogne called the Venus of Laussel.”
The bas-relief, carved 20,000 to 18,000 years ago, was found in 1911 in what is now southwest France. Depicting a faceless, voluptuous woman holding a horn to her mouth in profile and gesturing toward her stomach, “early on the horn becomes this symbol of holding something that is nurturing and valuable,” Ms. Bachmann said.
In the Neolithic age (17,000 to 7,000 B.C.), she noted, people started wearing horn jewelry when they had “a bit of the animal left over that wasn’t useful for food, shelter, clothing.”
About 3,500 B.C., in the area that now is the Italian city of Naples, the cornicello pendant appeared — and over time the elongated horn with a slight twist came to signify Italian heritage. “To this day,” she said, “people wear cornicellos or an Italian pepper, because it looks like a curly cute pepper with a point at the end.” (Such amulets were worn throughout Southern Europe by the 19th century as talismans for fertility, protection and good health, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s website.)
The horn pendant became generally popular again in the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe and the United States, said Cornelie Holzach, the director of the Jewelry Museum in Pforzheim, Germany. That was, she said, when hippie jewelry appeared and people were “wearing these long chains with something on it and hanging different things on it.”
Other cultures have a history with horn pendants, too, including the Northwest Coast Peoples of North America and the people of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“Something Magical”
While many of the horn’s traditional connections are still relevant today, there are also some new ones.
For Ms. Toledano of Rainbow K, her elephant tusk-inspired horn shapes represent power as “the animal is a strong one,” she said.
And Mr. Bittar said he sees a phallic connection: “There is this kind of masculine trait to the horn, just the shape of it.”
Evan Sugerman, the co-founder of the Parts of Four brand and a resident of Bali, offered a more mystical take. He said he believes the design “throws back to the unicorn horn,” noting that “there’s something magical about forest creatures with these incredible growths from their head.” (The brand makes sculptural horn charms in silver-plated brass [$959] from resin reproductions of horns that he buys from online stores such as The Bone Room).
And working with the horn shapes has changed Mr. Sugerman’s creative approach to his soft, rounded Monster Horn Bracelet with pavé diamond slivers ($2,097). “The horn shape for me has a feminine aspect to it, which is generally harder for me to access,” he said, adding that he has been thinking about making horns in shiny chrome, to emphasize the lines.
The Los Angeles jewelry designer Jacquie Aiche said she is planning to laser engrave an evil eye motif on the back of a rock crystal horn to “ward off the evil spirit so it’s like double action. You get double action of protective energy,” she said.
She also noted that horn jewels are trickier to make than they look: “They are so pointy. If they get into the wrong hands or if the polisher is not taking care, then you can easily chip those tips.”
And, she said, “if you can’t polish it back to its original shape then you have to start from zero.”
Her estimate of the damages? “We break one out of five.”
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