There is a funny thing going on in jewelry: Shoulders have become its trendiest showcase.
Whether the accessory is a brooch, epaulet or necklace across one or both shoulders, the look is “fun and chic and different,” Emily Evans, a stylist based in London and New York whose clients have included the singer and actress Nicole Scherzinger and the model Ashley Graham, said in an email.
Just be sure to “avoid anything too detailed or patterned,” Ms. Evans cautioned, so you “don’t fight the outfit with the jewelry.”
The style has made inroads in high jewelry, too, with some shoulder-specific pieces introduced this season. For example, Boucheron’s creative director, Claire Choisne, presented an 18-karat white gold and blackened titanium shoulder brooch in the shape of an iris, accented with diamonds (price on request).
And on the red carpet, the actress Cate Blanchett liked her custom-made Louis Vuitton pearl and diamond shoulder necklace so much that she wore it twice — first at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in May and again at the Venice Film Festival that August.
At Cannes this year, the Brazilian model Isabeli Fontana landed on numerous best dressed lists wearing an 18-karat white gold and titanium shoulder sculpture by Elsa Jin with a total of more than 240 carats of diamonds and five emeralds totaling almost 80 carats. It was a jewel that “you couldn’t miss if you tried,” the jewelry industry magazine Instore said, “and it proved that one standout piece is all you need as long as it is inventively designed.”
The rapture that such pieces have generated on social media has fueled the shoulder jewel trend, said Louis Circe, the creative director of the London costume jewelry brand Vickisarge, which sells the crystal-studded Aurora Garland shoulder piece (1,250 pounds, or in the United States, $1,443).
“People are a little more desperate to be seen as individuals, to decorate themselves slightly differently than the next person,” he said, “and I think people have now thought, ‘Oh, OK, the shoulder is where we can go next.’”
‘Something Different’
Little wonder then that Romany Starrs, a jeweler in East Kilbride, Scotland, decided to make her first shoulder jewel this year: the Harlequin Grid Epaulette, two openwork silver brooches accented with blue, green and teal sapphires and connected by three chains (£2,200, or $3,047 in the United States).
Inspired by military epaulets and their associations with armor, Ms. Starrs said she had decided that she “wanted to make something different,” a design that “was not something typical that you would see in shops, but something avant garde.” While most of her necklaces, earrings and rings take about four to six weeks to make, the one-of-a-kind Harlequin design took four months.
Ensuring that its design would not restrict the wearer’s movement proved to be difficult. “The piece was too heavy, I think, the first time I made it,” she said. “And it wouldn’t stay on when you moved your shoulder.”
So she removed some diamond shapes, made more of them openwork and changed the fittings, “because we had a brooch pin to start, which didn’t allow for any movement at all,” Ms. Starrs said. “So, it was top-heavy and falling forward.”
Now, she said, the piece can be worn with a brooch on the front of the shoulder and the other on the side, with chains looping across, or with the brooches pinned side-by-side on the top of the shoulder and the chains dangling down the arm.
As for her next shoulder design, Ms. Starrs said she is planning to go “bigger and bolder, with lots more chain.” In this piece, she plans to feature 18-karat gold and white diamonds “to make it more elevated.”
Complex Designs
Melanie Georgacopoulos, a jewelry designer who was born in Greece and now works in London and Hamburg, Germany, devised an unusual way to don her shoulder creation: The wearer holds the rows of pearls apart, puts her head through the gap and the piece then falls evenly across the shoulders, front and back.
Making such a piece was a complex task, according to Ms. Georgacopoulos. For her Full Circle Necklace (price on application), she began by sketching the circle and the strands of pearls that would run from one side to the other. Using a compass, she drew the circle on a large flat piece of wood, and placed the oxidized silver chain that became its outline, using pins to fix the chain in place on the wood.
She then ordered freshwater pearls in sizes from 12 millimeters for the center of the strands to three millimeters at the ends. She placed them in lines inside the circle, then threaded them, judging the distance between each pearl strand in an effort to match up to the chain’s links.
Often there was too much or too little distance between the strands, “so they had to be redone,” she said. And once the distance was wrong between two strands, “then you probably have to do all the other ones that came before as you have to rebalance the piece,” she said.
There also were accidents: “Sometimes strings break or sometimes, I remember, the chain got detached from the board so pearls flew off on the floor everywhere and I had to find them again.”
Finally she tried on the necklace, to see how it fell on her body.
The first attempt was a disaster. “It opened up too much, it went too low, it was too big, it didn’t feel right,” she recalled, so she started again, reducing the circle to its current 35-centimeter (13.8-inch) diameter “so that it fits better on the body.”
Ms. Georgacopoulos, who is known for her pearl creations, plans to use queen conch shells for her next shoulder jewels because, she said, their size “gives you more scope for bigger pieces.”
A Varied Past
The history of shoulder jewels stretches back to ancient Egypt, where officials as early as 3,000 B.C. “were wearing big collar necklaces with hard stones like lapis lazuli, carnelian and faience beads” to indicate their high status, according to Ilias Kapsalis, the manager at the vintage jewelry dealers Bentley & Skinner in London.
Michael Coan, an adjunct assistant professor of jewelry design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, said the shoulder jewels worn from the eighth to the third century B.C. in central Italy were circular pieces with pins down their middles, called fibulas, which were used to keep cloaks closed securely. Artisans at the time began decorating the circles, he said, using techniques such as filigree wire work and granulation, a metalworking technique in which tiny spheres are fused to the surface to create patterns or textures.
That design morphed into the crossbow fibula, “a large crescent or large half circle where you could put a lot of fabric in and hold it in place,” Mr. Coan said, adding that the style was created in bronze, silver or gold forms by the Romans.
Of course, shoulder jewelry was not limited to Europe. During China’s Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), gemstones adorned the popular yunjian, or cloud collar, designs, Mr. Coan said.
“In West Africa,” the stylist and fashion editor Barbara Ayozie Fu Safira wrote in an email, “shoulder jewelry is deeply rooted in tradition and is worn during significant ceremonies,” including weddings, particularly by people of high status. (For the 2022 “Call Me Every Day” music video with Chris Brown and Wizkid, she styled a model in a custom-made golden shoulder chain necklace from JéBlanc, the jewelry line designed by Jeniece Blanchet.)
By the 1920s in Europe and the United States, shoulder brooches and shoulder necklaces with tassels had become fashionable for women as well as men “to have that movement,” said Arabella Hiscox, a jewelry specialist at Christie’s London. Case in point: Cartier’s 1924 platinum shoulder brooch set with emeralds, rubies and diamonds and accented with a pearl and onyx bead tassel.
Figurative designs were popular in the second half of the 20th century, such as René Boivin’s 18-karat yellow-gold Lion Couché (Lion Lying Down) shoulder brooch, studded with yellow, orange and brown diamonds, sapphires and emeralds. The design, circa 1985, sold in May 2024 at Christie’s Geneva for 504,000 Swiss francs ($555,740 at the time).
Hidden Help
Shoulder jewels have long been a favorite of the Hong Kong jeweler Wallace Chan, who said in Cantonese through a translator that they allow more creativity than other jewels. And, he noted, such pieces as Stilled Life, his 2012 cicada shoulder brooch in green jadeite, can be seen from all angles.
They are more complex to make, too, he said. “You really need to study about the shoulder and how the shoulder moves,” so that when an object “stands on the shoulder it looks natural and aesthetic.”
So many of his objects have unexpected functions, such as the blue titanium fins accented with yellow and white diamonds in his Fish in Waves shoulder brooch. “One part would stand on the back of the shoulder, the other part would stand on the front of the shoulder, so this makes sure that the fish stands on the shoulder,” he said.
As for future creations, Mr. Chan plans a design that will include a 450-carat aquamarine, “which will let in a lot of light because of the cut and shape,” and to create a spider shoulder brooch because it’s a decorative style that “lends itself to the shape of the spider.”
And, he added, a fast, playful spider — think of the nursery rhyme “Little Miss Muffet,” frightened away when “along came a spider,” or Louise Bourgeois’s enormous spider sculptures. Both, he said, are well-suited to a shoulder brooch’s “more playful” design form.
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