THE JEWELRY LOVERS of Instagram (including yours truly) recently lost their minds over singer Harry Styles’ new jewel, a gorgeous micromosaic ring. The piece appears to be an antique, with a striking micromosaic design depicting a goldfinch perched on a branch as it guards a clutch of eggs in a nest.
Harry Styles is already a superstar in the jewelry community’s eyes, but this piece makes it feel like he is truly one of us. The popstar’s signature style involves a lot of our favorite kind of accessories, with rings on every finger, earrings, and strands of pearls in frequent rotation. But the micromoasic ring is different: it’s major historical jewelry, the kind of piece that serious collectors salivate over.
Micromosaic jewelry is a beautiful and labor-intensive style that is created with thousands of painstakingly-placed fragments of tesserae, typically made from glass or enamel. The style was very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in Italy, and was often featured in souvenir jewelry that young members of the nobility would bring home from their European Grand Tours. Surviving micromosaics vary greatly in condition, quality, and price, with finely detailed mosaics being the most desirable.
Eagle-eyed fans first spotted the remarkable piece during Harry Styles’ 2021 Grammy’s performance, but the ring exploded into greater prominence after the singer posted a clear view of it in a recent Instagram photo promoting his nail polish line. Styles was once photographed in a different antique micromosaic ring, but that piece was believed to be a loan from Guicci Creative Director Alessandro Michele, while the goldfinch ring is a permanent addition to Styles’ own collection.
Is this just one incident of extraordinary taste by a jewelry-loving celebrity, or is it the harbinger of a trend?
One could argue that Harry Styles’ style is already a powerfully influential force for jewelry, simply due to the fact that he’s a wildly popular cisgendered man who loves to wear jewelry. The internet is rife with fan accounts dedicated to analyzing the singer’s outfits, many of which have tens of thousands of followers. (Shout out to Harry Styles Fashion Archive, whose research helped confirm the details of this piece.)
High quality rings from the 18th and 19th century are already extremely coveted finds for antique jewelry collectors, a group that has grown exponentially in recent years. The appearance of such a ring – especially one that is so pretty and easy to appreciate without any background knowledge – can only bring even more attention to this highly desirable and increasingly scarce jewelry category.
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