Summer at the beach means bare feet, ice cream, tan lines, and terrible bug bites. Summer in the city means overpriced sandals, sushi, a bottled tan, and not a bug in sight. This year, get ready to see the surf meet the city, in bejeweled form. You heard it here first: This summer’s hottest jewelry trend is bugs.
That’s right, bug-themed jewelry is set to take over your dresser. First seen at chi-chi London boutique Liberty earlier this year, bees, flies, and wasps are adorning our necks, arms and ears this summer, sans bites and allergic reactions of course. Touted by the New York Times as perfect summer accessories, bugs are set to be big.
To be fair, jewelry trends have been a little wacky of late (with celebrity jeweler Theo Fennel making a sterling silver Haagen-Dazs case), but bugs, denote something altogether more subversive. According to a highly-questionable source on Freudian symbolization, spiders represent the mother who plagues the child through possessiveness and the power to arouse guilt. Just like wearing a pocket-sized Jewish mother on your wrist, then. There’s an interesting link between jewelry and homeware here too; creepy-crawlies have been spotted all over lamps, and cushions. It seems that bugs are invaded our bodies and our houses now, in a way that is rather more stylish and hopefully less portentous than the Biblical locust plague on Egypt.
If you want to give it a go, online retailer Alex Monroe has expanded their line of nature-themed jewelry to include gold and silver insects. At the more high-end, Dior Homme has a black resin spider pin that only a brave man would wear, and Chaumet, member of luxury family LVMH, has a whole range of pest-themed jewels, from butterflies and fireflies to a spiderweb necklaces made entirely from diamonds, worth over $1 million.
But if all this is a bit fancy and overpriced for you, there’s always the Real Insect Company, specializing in designs which feature scorpions, beetles, and even bats(!) encapsulated in glass or amber. As accessories, they definitely beat band-aids and calamine lotion, even if Freud wouldn’t approve.