Wrist assured: bold bangles are back

Wonder Woman has enjoyed more than a few facelifts since her invention as a comic book superhero in 1941, but one thing has remained: her matching bracelets. A symbol of strength and balance, capable of repelling attacks from “omega beams” and “heat vision” in the DC universe, nary an episode of the 1970s TV show went by without Lynda Carter rebuffing a bullet with her cuffs. In 2020, Carter revealed she still owned her Wonder Woman bracelets, in part because “wearing them still makes me feel like a total badass”.

It’s a simple equation: in a world where metallic armour no longer qualifies as daywear, cuff bracelets equal empowerment. It’s no coincidence that in the latest Wonder Woman franchise movie starring Gal Gadot, the superheroine wears a Tiffany “Bone” cuff in 18-carat gold when she’s playing the civilian. Designed by Elsa Peretti in the 1970s, and inspired by the bones of Capuchin monks she had pilfered from a 17th-century church cemetery as a child, the cuffs are still radiating confidence on the red carpet today. Exhibit A: Venus Williams, whose white crepe Elie Saab column gown for the 2022 Oscars was punctuated by two silver Bone cuffs. “They tied the entire look together, giving it this futuristic yet elegant feel,” Williams told Vogue.

Armfuls of bangles and cuffs are trending. Exhibit B: Hailey Bieber, who showed up at the Vanity Fair Oscars party in March in a beige Saint Laurent ruched dress and stacks of gold Bone bracelets and bangles on both wrists. It was a similar story at the Grammys, where Addison Rae wore double cuffs by Jennifer Fisher and Megan Thee Stallion paired a racy Roberto Cavalli dress with armfuls of shiny gold bangles. Sculptural cuffs were on the spring catwalks, too, at Balmain, Chanel and Saint Laurent (both retailers Net-a-Porter and MyTheresa.com have bought heavily into the latter). At Prada numerous looks were punctuated with ’90s-style bicep cuffs worn on both arms. No wonder vintage jewellery dealer Susan Caplan has seen a 30 per cent uptick in sales of bangles and cuffs year-on-year.

For Rosh Mahtani, founder of London-based jewellery label Alighieri, the bangle stack is the logical next step from pandemic-era Zoom dressing, which forced the spotlight on necklaces and earrings. “People are looking for the next big thing after necklace layering, so loading up your wrists is the new focus,” she says.

Alighieri is seeing a “massive” rise in bangle sales, with customers buying its bracelets in unusually high multiples. “They’re on a par with earrings now,” reports Mahtani, whose bangle styles start at £285 and rise to £3,100 for a chunky chain-link bracelet in 24-carat gold-plated bronze. She herself is rarely seen without a mix of metals snaking up her wrists. “I’ve always loved the sheer physical weight — when your arms are loaded up with bracelets, quite literally, it reminds you of how strong you are,” she laughs. Her fondest cuff memory is of the headmistress at her senior school who wore a single shiny silver cuff. “I was always fascinated by it. I guess I associate them with authority figures.”

The Turkish jeweller Begüm Kiroglu is equally fond of a statement cuff, albeit for talismanic reasons. “I wear my scarab cuff every day, I think it brings me good luck,” she explains. She has added bejewelled turtles, frogs, crabs and ants to her gold-plated cuff selection for her brand Begüm Khan, inspired by ancient Egyptian designs that often functioned as amulets. Kiroglu inherited her taste for cuffs from her mother, who passed on her 1980s-era Yves Saint Laurent bracelets inlaid with cabochons and semi-precious stones to her daughter. “I like to wear them over a tight, long-sleeved black sweater,” she advises.

The LA-based jeweller Sophie Buhai connects cuffs with a more “artful” aesthetic emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic. “They’ve always resonated with a collector kind of woman, an appreciator of things that are artful — somebody who appreciates it for themselves, not because they are following any trends,” she clarifies.

Her clients are also into objects that double up as sculpture at home. “Some of these larger pieces look beautiful on a mantelpiece or vanity.” She cites Man Ray’s images of Suzy Solidor and Jacqueline Goddard wearing armfuls of chunky jewellery from wrist to elbow as the primary inspiration behind her silver Katia cuff. “There’s something very mature about a bangle — it takes a lot of confidence when you’re wearing larger, sculptural pieces.”

As for the ultimate trendsetter, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, from the 1930s, she was rarely photographed without her mismatched pair of white enamel Verdura cuffs, set with colourful jewelled Maltese crosses. Designed for her by Fulco di Verdura, the Italian duke who became her jewellery designer at Chanel, and who went on to found his eponymous brand, the design is still “disproportionately important” to the house, according to Verdura president Nico Landrigan.

“If you look at what jewellery looked like in the 1920s, the idea of big wide cuffs with lumps of colour — it was totally not done,” says Landrigan, speaking of an era when delicate diamonds and platinum dominated high society. In contrast, Verdura mixed semi-precious stones with precious, used then-unfashionable gold and incorporated natural objects such as shells to create drama. Diana Vreeland, former Vogue editor and lover of rule-breakers, thoroughly approved: she too wore Verdura cuffs and Maltese cross brooches to adorn her turbans, and a host of New York socialites followed. “[Verdura] wanted the effect of scale, size, colour, more than he was interested in selling a big important sapphire,” explains Landrigan. “It was a stylistic revolution in jewellery in the 20th century. He brought cuffs into the modern era.”

They’re still delighting: Sofia Coppola and Julia Garner are recent Verdura cuff fans. And though no one could ever pass them off as understated, there’s a certain joie de vivre about a chunky bracelet that defies tradition. Not for nothing are Chanel’s white enamel cuffs, which are today held in a vault, incredibly scratched after years of wear. As Landrigan says: “Jewellery is so often tarred with about luxury in the wrong sense: status, spending, showing off. But luxury is not something you unwrap from plastic.” 

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