Read My Pins_ Stories From a Diplomat's Jewel Box - Madeleine Albright [17]
Throughout my life with brooches, there has been one overriding challenge: how to wear them.
I long ago stopped wearing long necklaces, because they bounced around. I never liked the appearance of pins on lapels, especially on me. Pins on coats did not suit me either. I always preferred to wear brooches on the left side, thinking they looked better there, but the larger ones got in the way when I carried a purse with a strap. Smaller pins gradually appealed less because I had grown accustomed to what one reviewer of my books referred to as my “big honker brooches.”
My Monticello flag, Butler & Wilson.
Hats, like jewelry, can be expressive. I spent my teenage years in Colorado and developed a fondness for Stetsons. I rekindled this affection when traveling as secretary of state, both because I liked the look and because I had more bad hair days than I could count. Cowgirl hat, Ultra Craft.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
I like to arrange my bees and flower in different ways. One evening, while sitting with Aga Khan at a State Department dinner on cultural diplomacy, I had the bees in an ascending line.
There was also the dilemma of how to arrange multiple pins. Some went together naturally, such as the zebras that I wore to a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Other combinations took more imagination—for example, bees approaching a sunflower. It was fun experimenting with various arrangements, but the practice threatened to consume too much energy. This is beside the fact that my clothes began to resemble dartboards, so perforated were they by the pins; eventually, I had to wear more and even bigger ones to mask the destruction.
At the same time, I had to deal with what a male friend described to me in jest as the Hooters issue. At Morey Junior High School in Denver, I had worn a blouse with a decoration that included two spiderwebs made of white stitching. I also owned a pair of small bug pins that I did not hesitate to place at the center of the spiderwebs, which were located on the left and right sides of my torso, face-front, breast-high. Given my age at the time, no one pointed out that they resembled pasties. With maturity comes growth, however, and as I traveled the world as a diplomat, I wanted people to look at my pins without embarrassing either the observers or me. So I wore the pins higher and higher up.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Spiders and their web, reproductions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Flower with four bees, Joseff of Hollywood.
Nelson Mandela represented a new hope in Africa in the mid-1990s. I wore my favorite zebra pins when I met him at his estate in Pretoria, South Africa, in December 1997. From left: Medium zebra, Ciner; large zebra, KUO; small zebra, designer unknown.
JUDA NGWENYA/REUTERS
Foxy Lady, Lea Stein.
I was justified in this approach when the foreign minister of South Korea made a comment, intended to be off the record, that he enjoyed hugging me at meetings and press conferences because I had “firm breasts.” When the remark hit the newspapers, the foreign minister almost lost his job. Upon being asked to comment, I said, “Well, I have to have something to put these pins on.” After that, the controversy quieted, but when I next met the foreign minister, instead of embracing we stopped an arm’s length apart and shook hands.
One reason I had so many meetings with the foreign minister of South Korea is that we had so many quarrels with North Korea. That country’s dictator, Kim Jong-il, had begun testing long-range missiles of a type that could conceivably threaten the territory of the United States. We were determined to prevent that, and so I traveled to Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, to negotiate.
In no other country on Earth are pins more crucial or less decorative.