Author: admin

The white gold and diamond brooch set like a moving snake was not the first time Zendaya wore the jewellery category most associated with grandmothers. But due to its placement, it might have been the most talked about. In attendance at the Met gala, the Dune actor pinned the Bulgari brooch to the back of her white Louis Vuitton suit.

“The Met Gala really was prime time for brooches,” Melbourne stylist Stuart Walford says.

While fashion critics have heralded the brooch’s return to menswear for several seasons, lately it has found its way to women’s lapels too. Also at the Met Gala, Sarah Snook pinned a cluster of silver brooches from Rahaminov Diamonds and Saidian Vintage Jewels to her blazer, Aimee Lou Wood and Doja Cat both wore brooches in the shape of flowers covered in tiny diamonds (by Cartier and David Webb respectively), while the event’s host, Anna Wintour, complimented her pale blue suit with an antique brooch by Lydia Courteille.

At the SNL 50th reunion Tina Fey wore an art deco T-shaped brooch, Cynthia Erivo wore several to the 56th NAACP Image Awards and, more than once, the fashion writer Leandra Medine Cohen has featured a 1930s Jean Cocteau fish pin on her Substack, The Cereal Aisle.

The brooch also remained the accessory of choice for men at the Oscars with Kieran Culkin, Adrien Brody and Colman Domingo prettifying their suits with ones shaped like tear drops, feathers and ribbons – in that order.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given their prominence on the red carpet, it’s hard to find a major fashion house that doesn’t have a brooch in its recent collections, from Gucci to Loewe and Schiaparelli. In Australia, designers Carla Zampatti, Edward Cuming and Mimco are also selling brooches.

For Sydney jeweller Lucas Blacker, a brooch is “almost like a tattoo”.

“It is a sign from the wearer to show their personality,” Blacker says. At his studio, Black Cicada, he is seeing more clients wanting to repurpose inherited jewellery or pieces they aren’t wearing by turning them into brooches.

Olivia Cummings, the jewellery designer behind Cleopatra’s Bling, says: “Brooches require care in their placement and a sense of ceremony in their wearing. I think people are craving that now.”

The personal statement brooch has deep roots, evolving from simple pins used to hold garments closed in the bronze age to intricate adornments that communicated class, religion and marital status in ancient Rome. In the 18th and 19th centuries, brooches became the original Instagram-holiday-post, featuring micro mosaics of the European tourist towns they were bought in. More recently, the brooches of Madeleine Albright and Queen Elizabeth II were rumoured to carry coded messages.

“Brooches are conversation starters, that’s what makes them so special,” Walford says.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

In some ways the brooch’s rising popularity is consistent with the lipstick indicator, which suggests when economic times are tough people cut back on big purchases and turn to small, affordable luxuries – such as lipstick or, according to Walford, brooches. The financial appeal is twofold: they are a great item to thrift and they help the wearer freshen up their existing wardrobe without buying an entirely new outfit, he says.

When styling brooches, Walford recommends balancing the proportions with the size of your lapel. “If it’s narrow, keep things small and delicate. For a large and oversized 80s-style lapel, you could go big.”

“Don’t feel like you have to stop at one – if we learned anything from this year’s Met Gala, it’s that a brooch can be layered and stacked.”

Alternatively, take a leaf out of Zendaya’s book and fasten one to the back of a coat or dress – just watch out for your handbag strap if you do it. “There are no rules,” Cummings says. “I also love to wear them over the top button of a shirt or pinned to a straw hat in summer.” A brooch is a great way to break up an all-black outfit, to fasten a scarf thrown over the shoulders or to add some sparkle to a basket or handbag.

If you’re looking to start, or add to, a brooch collection, try searching for vintage brooches on secondhand sites such as Vestiaire Collective or online marketplaces such as Etsy, eBay and 1stDibs – the results page feels like rifling through a wealthy, bohemian grandmother’s jewellery box. Antique stores and vintage markets also often have extensive brooch collections, if you prefer to peruse in real life. From gold nose-and-mouth sculptures by Salvador Dalí to 1980s Lanvin flowers and enamel and rhinestone sea shells – each pin contains the possibility of another, fancier world.

At their best, brooches should feel like small sculptures – striking from afar but still full of detail when you come closer, Cummings says. “Weight and balance are important but above all it should carry a sense of story.”

What Kept You opens in death: fires are raging through the Sydney hills, where Jahan lives with her husband, Ali. The revelation that she is grieving her nani’s death follows shortly afterwards and, a beat later, we learn she has recently suffered a miscarriage.

In the early pages of her extraordinary debut, Raaza Jamshed warns the reader this is not a story of clean endings and tidy miracles. This is a novel full of ritual and poetry. A type of witchcraft, and of healing. “Perhaps, that’s what I’m trying to do here – to build a staircase out of words, to climb towards you to the sky or descend into the grave and lie down beside you,” Jahan writes of her nani.

This is a novel that sits comfortably in the grey areas between the literal and the figurative; between overcoming grief and being overcome by it. It exists between two worlds – not unlike Jahan herself, who grew up in Pakistan, raised by her nani, before fleeing, as a young adult, to Sydney.

In Pakistan, Jahan’s nani kept a watchful eye on her, mapping out the shadowy motivations of the world around them through story and superstition. But as an adolescent, Jahan begins to rebel against the stories she has been told, wanting, as all young people do, to find her own narrative, and her defiance brings her closer to danger. Her recollections start to form a second narrative: we begin to learn the reason she couldn’t stay in Pakistan, and the night she did something that has haunted her in the years since.

Jahan tries to find herself between the stories of her mother, who believed in the predictable arcs of conventional romance, and those of her nani, who spoke of dark things hiding in the shadows. She struggles to identify with either. This disconnect is amplified by her life in Australia, a country where she both belongs and doesn’t, where she has found a friend and a husband who accept her but never seem to fully understand her. There’s a sense that everyone in this story holds themselves at arm’s-length from each other, preventing true intimacies, although their relationships are underpinned by genuine care and concern.

In first-person narration, Jahan addresses her nani throughout. Early on, a facilitator at a grief circle tells her to write for 14 days to a person with whom she has unfinished business: “You write and write and write. And when you’re done, you don’t back-read the letter. You burn it.” And even though this seems to fly in the face of her nani’s belief in the power of stories spoken aloud and shared, the idea takes root in Jahan. There is a sense across the novel’s 15 chapters that we are reading her response to the writing assignment, as she processes the unfinished business she had hoped to leave in Pakistan; the business that keeps her from returning to visit her nani, even upon her death.

Alternating between her recollection of the past and the immediate crisis in the present, these chapters are in part a confession and in part Jahan’s attempt to gain control over her own story.

Jamshed peppers her text with Urdu and Arabic phrases. She leans into the slippage of words, delighting in the poetry and double meanings found in translation. For example, Shamshad (nani’s name) “implicates itself in the English ‘shame’ in the first half but swiftly escapes it in the Urdu ‘happiness’ of the second”. The pleasure for the reader is twofold: Jamshed’s expression is a joy to read, treading carefully between poetry and prose; and thematically, the careful unpacking of words and meaning adds complexity, indirectly critiquing the loss of identity and language that occurs through the flattening process of western colonisation.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Towards the end of the novel, as the fires close in around her and Jahan nears the climax of her recollection of the past, she picks through the half lies and truths that she has told herself over the years. Finally, she lands on this: “All I wanted to be was a girl who was not afraid.” Has she succeeded? In some ways, she has outrun the fears that kept her in place throughout her adolescence, but there is a sense that these have been replaced by something just as dark and unforgiving.

What Kept You? is tightly crafted and rich in poetic metaphor, but the real satisfaction for a reader lies in its complex portrayal of grief and growing up. By rejecting either of the fixed narratives that Jahan’s matriarchs have prescribed her, Jamshed imagines a space in which grief and hope might coexist. Ultimately, her question is not how to outwit fate, but how to make peace with uncertainty.

Become a Vogue Business Member to receive unlimited access to Member-only reporting and insights, our Beauty and TikTok Trend Trackers, Member-only newsletters and exclusive event invitations.

Get as much rest as you can this summer: the official Paris Fashion Week schedule is out and it’s packed like a summer suitcase.

Altogether, the Spring/Summer 2026 women’s ready-to-wear calendar, which will run from 29 September to 7 October, features a total of 76 shows and 36 presentations — compared to a respective 66 and 40 for SS25. Matthieu Blazy’s much-anticipated first show at Chanel will be held on 6 October at 8pm, while Jonathan Anderson’s womenswear debut at Dior (following his men’s show in June) will take place on 1 October at 2.30pm.

Behind the scenes at Chanel SS25.

Photo: Acielle/Style Du Monde

As previously reported, it’s a high-stakes season with an unprecedented number of designer debuts against a backdrop of an industry downturn. Will these renewed creative visions help the industry to rebound?

There’s an impressive number of brands returning to the calendar. They include Thom Browne (who hasn’t shown during ready-to-wear in Paris since September 2022), Lanvin (which chose the eve of couture for Peter Copping’s debut last season), Vetements and Agnès b. The flurry of debuts include Loewe, Jean Paul Gaultier, Carven and Mugler. There are also the ‘half debuts’: the first ready-to-wear show of Glenn Martens at Margiela after impressing with his couture and Michael Rider’s summer 2026 collection at Celine after his July co-ed debut, which was a “spring” (or resort) collection, per the house verbiage. “I believe in the calendar,” Rider said backstage in July. (His predecessor Hedi Slimane had been showing mostly off-calendar via a video format.)

If you use music to set or fix your mood, Spotify is a tantalising tool. Feeling sad? Cry to your personalised “Depress Sesh Mix”. In a romantic crisis? Stew in your own “Situationship Mix”. As I write this, I’m listening to Spotify’s Daylist, a mix that refreshes every few hours based on my own listening habits. Today’s vibe is “funky beats roller skating tuesday early morning mix”. At 120bpm, the algorithm knows I need some energetic house to roll from my bed to my desk.

The problem with this listening experience isn’t just the creepy AI-driven intimacy of it all, more that the same songs are recycled in a predictable loop. Spotify’s algorithm has anaesthetised artists I once enjoyed. Every time I hear the slippery psychedelic bass of Khruangbin slinking into one of my playlists, or flow in seamlessly from another artist’s radio, I violently hit skip.

A decade ago, Spotify favoured human-curated playlists made by artists, celebrities and music aficionados. But in 2021, the streaming company pivoted towards machine learning, feeding “nearly half a trillion events” into computer models every day. Now, user data – chiefly our listening history, interactions with Spotify’s user interface and the time of day – is packaged into a mixtape for every micro-occasion.

Advocates argue this is a chance to democratise music promotion, neatly matching artists with their audiences. Critics suggest this ultra-subjective experience limits musical discovery to the already familiar – and the less it’s challenged, the more my music taste narrows. So as a test, I quit Spotify for a month, to bring some soul back into the way I find music.

First, I consulted people who had never used streaming services, like my dad, who grew up in 1970s London in the heyday of punk and glam rock. Hunched in a booth in his local record shop, he would listen to a sample and take a punt on what vinyl to buy – A-side or B-side. Some albums apparently missed the mark, and others, like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, transported him to a different universe. He insisted I start with my favourite artists, and listen to every album front to back, as if reading a story.

Inspired, I bought a $30 record player in an op-shop and hunted for vinyls. Late to the record renaissance, it was slim pickings – Australian pub classics, Christian country or Christmas hits. But when a friend pointed out my new turntable was missing a needle, it became a dusty but decorative addition to my living room.

My 20-year-old neighbour had another suggestion: a diamante-encrusted iPod, which she produced in a ziplock bag like a hallowed artefact. Found for $200 on Facebook Marketplace, plugging in wired earplugs and hitting shuffle was a nostalgic throwback. But this romance was short-lived: the iPod was incompatible with my Bluetooth speaker and demanded hours of admin to upload music.

The biggest challenge came when driving my old silver Subaru, as I was stranded with only a single CD, a flimsy aux cord and my thoughts. Stuck with silence, I wondered what the new grinding noise was – until I discovered my local community broadcaster, Vox FM 106.9. More than 5 million Australians listen to community radio every week, for 17 hours on average – and now, I can see why. The station prides itself on “real music” and even has the tagline “You never know what you like until you try it”. Just what I needed! And it’s true, I had forgotten how good it feels to wind down the windows and blast Push the Button by the Sugababes, and then to roll them up again when a classical German song, a mystery even to Shazam, comes on.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

I contacted Justin Moon, who runs a popular underground radio station and record shop in Newcastle. He sources music from record fairs, friends, and Bandcamp – distributing interesting sounds as a conduit, or Hermes figure, to lay (or lazy) people like me. Moon is noticing that his customers are searching for a more “active” listening experience. “It’s not this kind of passive wash-over-you rubbish that you make your two-minute noodles to and forget all about 10 seconds later,” he says.

Music – like film, TV, and food – is now served to us effortlessly, instantly. But this has caused the way we consume music to be more siloed. Spending a month hunting for new music myself, rather than relying on an algorithm, made me feel more connected to my parents, friends, radio presenters and even complete strangers. Their recommendations – whether to my taste or not – came with a part of themselves, a memory, or a shared interest.

After my month’s Spotify hiatus, my algorithm hasn’t been cleansed. Over the course of writing this piece, my daylist has evolved into “french indietronica swimming pool tuesday afternoon”, whatever that means. There are two Khruangbin songs on there. It’s safe to say I would rather play roulette with the radio.