When Jewelry Carries a Message: Madeleine Albright and Her Pins
October 11, 09
When Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. Secretary of State, she used brooches as her own language of symbols for diplomacy. So much so, her brooches now have stories linking them to her work at the State Department. 
Madeleine Albright wearing an
American Eagle brooch
Using brooches, or "pins" as Albright prefers, to express the current state of affairs started after then-Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein made disparaging comments about her. Albright explained the connection between her use of pins and the dictator during an interview for CNN.
"…It all kind of started as a joke. I do like jewelry, but when Saddam Hussein called me a snake, I happened to have a snake pin. And I was doing an interview, actually with CNN, and your cameras picked up that I had on a snake pin, and I was asked why and I said, ‘because Saddam Hussein has just called me a snake.’”
Albright's brooches became a visible way to gauge her mood or what was on her mind. “When people asked me what kind of a mood I was in or what I was working on I’d say, ‘read my pins.’ So, then it kind of got to be a thing in itself, and I now have a lot of them and they mostly have wonderful stories attached to them…”
Recently Albright published a memoir, detailing the way her brooches were used in diplomacy. Titled Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box, provides her readers with a close look at the pins she wore which became her diplomatic trademark. The brooches were almost always chosen to convey a message to the people with whom she met.
During the opening of a related exhibition at the