When the now two-time best-actor winner Adrien Brody took to the Oscars stage last night, the golden statuette he received for his work in The Brutalist wasn’t the only gleaming hardware that caught the eye. Affixed to the chest of his sharp Giorgio Armani tuxedo was an outsized feathery brooch from the high jewelry designer Elsa Jin—a sequel of sorts to the Jin piece he wore to January’s Golden Globes. “It’s just beautiful,” Brody told reporters about the brooch in the press room following his win.
Adrien Brody
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Colman Domingo
Frank Micelotta/Getty Images
And while Brody’s accessory was by far the most sizable, he was hardly alone in adorning his dinner jacket last night. Two of his fellow best-actor nominees, Sing Sing’s Colman Domingo and The Apprentice’s Sebastian Stan, sported gleaming brooches on their lapels—a golden swoosh of ribbon from Boucheron’s archives for the former, and a diamond-set floral Cartier number for the latter. (A third contender, Timothée Chalamet, left his jacket bare but did don a shimmering Cartier necklace beneath his collar.)
Sebastian Stan
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Kieran Culkin
Chelsea Guglielmino
All throughout the Dolby Theater, in fact, it seemed there were far more lapels boasting all manner of embellishment than not. Best-supporting-actor winner Kieran Culkin wore a pair of tiny gem-set pins, and the man who handed him the trophy, Robert Downey Jr., had a colorful and sparkly piece of his own. Joe Alwyn, Kit Connor, Giancarlo Esposito, and Sterling K. Brown all added to the brooch parade with geometric, stone-happy badges, while Omar Apollo got playful with a flashy silver lizard.
Giancarlo Esposito
Chelsea Guglielmino
Omar Apollo
Chelsea Guglielmino
Emilia Pérez musician Clément Ducol nearly matched Brody with the scale of the ornament affixed to his suede jacket. Guy Pearce, nominated for his role supporting Brody in The Brutalist, was one of several attendees to use a lapel pin to express solidarity with Palestine. And Jeff Goldblum, as is his exuberant wont, took an old-school route with a billowy boutonniere of purple florals.
Guy Pearce
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Jeff Goldblum
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Of course, brooches aren’t a new move on the red carpet—they’ve been especially prevalent in recent years as men have embraced all manner of jewelry, from bracelets and rings to tie pins and necklaces, beyond the standard high-end watch. But last night’s Oscars felt like a confirmation of the brooch as the mode of formalwear expression for Hollywood actors—a chance to exude a bit of the maximalist playfulness with a classic tuxedo that they so often do with their entire looks on less restrictive occasions.
Some viewers had perhaps a less charitable view on the evening’s biggest menswear trend. During The New Yorker’s Oscars live blog, staff writer Vinson Cunningham argued that “the brooch is a kind of shortcut, a gesture toward style that is elsewhere not in evidence. ‘You like this, honey?’ right before you walk out the door kind of stuff. I do not respect these brooches and they do not alter my analysis.”
