This spring/summer 2027 season, jewellery took an all-or-nothing approach. On the subdued end: catwalk looks styled entirely jewellery-free, a pared-back look to balance against the exuberance of print, colour and texture. On the other, more exuberant end: bold jewels that don’t shy away from making a statement.
Though runway jewellery might have been pared back in quantity, in design the season’s standout pieces have leaned into a more-is-more narrative. From sculptural metals and surrealist silhouettes to lively blooms and spring-apropos displays of flowering beauty, maximalism was concentrated into a single accessory—the earring! It’s a developing trend that matches up with recent red carpet dressing. Increasingly, the must-have bijoux are earrings.
There were few limits to where the canvas began and ended, as designers got inventive with the humble earring. At Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli went off the cuff with a range of experimental ideas. Climber ear cuffs with golden bells that trace the helix to the lobe, huggie loops in mini to oversized volumes, and even ball stud earrings with long chains that can be linked and transformed into a hybrid necklace.
The treatment of the earring as a blank canvas, in some instances, went literal. Acnes Studios showed a collection with rococo and New Romantics leanings, and on its earrings used the art of enamel painting to bring a touch of 19th-century fantasy to a mini, wearable frame. Mugler, meanwhile, took an abstract route with brushstroke accents that recalled the iridescence of mother-of-pearl.
Fashion never happens in a vacuum, and this ready-to-wear season traced similar ideas started at the preceding fall/winter 2026 haute couture shows. An inclination then for florals—for spring, what a novelty!—has only become more overt. Perhaps it’s a trend associated with the relationships between biospheres and technology, and the enamoured feeling for things that are natural—a rarity these days.
For spring/summer 2027, designers took their botanical inspirations with more literal interpretations. Dolce & Gabbana showed gilded flowers, Blumarine made oversized flowers (worn solo on one side) that wrapped around the ear, and at Dior, the house’s botanical codes were reinterpreted as dangling, supersized garlands.
More broadly, bigger did in fact mean better. At London Fashion Week, emerging brands like Onalaja and Labrum played with sculptural forms—with the latter paying homage to their West African heritage through supersized glimmering golden disks. A sense of play and scale also found its way into the French house Carven, which turned metal into delicate pencil shavings—albeit distorted into a cocooning size.
The season’s most directional designs, however, looked like they had been plucked from alternate worlds. Andreas Kronthaler’s collection at Vivienne Westwood included spring design earrings that had a punk sense of both imagined dystopian futures and our real-life analogue past. Uma Wang plunged headfirst into the future, with alien-looking voluminous forms and wired Calder-esque attachments that framed the face.
And for a playful finish—what is luxury without a bit of fun?—look to Jean Paul Gaultier, which under the direction of Duran Lantink is coming to reclaim its reputation as the enfant terrible of fashion. Lantink closed his show with a section of jingling looks finished with bells—he told Vogue.com’s Sarah Mower that he’d been inspired by a 1989 bell-festooned glove, and that Gaulter-loving clients were “also a bit loud”. The standout: a sharp trapezium-shape pair, rather like cowbells, that made a striking counterpoint to a delightfully tall and bulbous hat.
