When Katherine Purcell, a joint managing director at the London antiques dealer Wartski, started planning an exhibition on brooches four years ago, she couldn’t have known what a red-hot style statement such pins would be by the show’s opening on Oct. 1 of this year.
Just one example: The racecar driver Lewis Hamilton wore two brooches to the Met Gala, putting a 1980s 18-karat gold and diamond floral brooch by Briony Raymond on his beret and, on his lapel, an 18-karat gold pin with lab-grown diamonds and pearls that had been custom-made by Wales Bonner and Snow Diamonds.
Brooches allow “people to express themselves in a completely different way,” Ms. Purcell said. “You can be inventive in the way that you wear them — whereas all other types of jewelry, there’s only one place that you can actually put them on the body.”
“From Function to Fantasy: The Brooch” is to display 255 pieces, dating from 1200 B.C. to the present, through Oct. 12 in the Wartski shop on St. James’s Street. Its usual stock of antique jewelry and objets d’art and jewelry by Carl Fabergé is moving into storage, Ms. Purcell said.
The oldest exhibit, she said, will be a Bronze Age multiple spiral fibula brooch, formed from a single length of copper alloy wire. And the most recent one was completed this year: a platinum turban jewel accented with spinels, diamonds and pearls by the Mumbai jeweler Viren Bhagat.
Jewels will be arranged chronologically to the 1920s and 1930s, and in themes such as Royal and the Stage.
The Imperial French section will include an 1805 gold and silver laurel spray accented with diamonds and rubies, attributed to Marie-Étienne Nitot and his son, François Regnault Nitot, and owned by Empress Josephine. (The Nitot family business later became Chaumet).
And there will be a 1970s icepop brooch by Bulgari in the Whimsical section as it is “such an unusual motif for jewelry,” Ms Purcell said. Made in nephrite and chrysoprase on a gold stick, there’s a “bite taken out with diamonds,” she said.
To keep a show on one small kind of jewelry compelling, Ms Purcell said the pieces will be grouped in unusual ways, showing “different types of artists treating the same subject.” One example: pairing 18th century cut-steel brooches with faceted studs that mimicked gemstones with a 2007 heart-shape brooch of a painted cracked mirror accented with white beads, opals and crystals and scattered with glitter by the sculptor Andrew Logan for Zandra Rhodes.
Many of the brooches are more intricate than they seem, Ms. Purcell said, such as the 1878 gold and silver ribbon brooch by Oscar Massin that was accented with diamonds to look like lace.
“It’s made by a single piece of metal that’s been pierced by hand so that it looks openwork, and then you’re having to actually make those settings for each of those diamonds” to appear as if they are floating, she said. To do that on curved surfaces is complex, because the surface “is going in onto itself,” she said.
Entrance to the exhibition, marking Wartski’s 160th anniversary, will be free, but exhibits will not be labeled, with just the 10 pound ($13.50) catalog describing them. Proceeds will go to the King’s Trust, founded in 1976 by then-Prince Charles to help vulnerable youth.
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