Luxury Brands Embrace Charms, Medallions, and Celestial Motifs as Identity Markers

When the Financial Times convened its March Watches & Jewellery roundup, the verdict from designers, collectors, and market specialists was remarkably unified: the charm is having its most culturally loaded moment in years. Luxury brands are leaning into miniature, talismanic objects — charms, medallions, and zodiac and astral motifs — to translate life milestones into visible markers of identity, with designers from Ashley Zhang to Jade Trau arriving at the same territory from opposite directions.

Zhang, whose collections draw on sentimental and celestial imagery to translate historical codes into refined, wearable pieces, frames the appeal in elemental terms. "For me, symbolism is so easily expressed in charms," she says. "It can be a stone with meaning, an engraving, a literal symbol." The Ashley Zhang locket, featured in the roundup, exemplifies that precision: each piece carries a compressed grammar of personal meaning, readable only to its wearer.

Trau arrives at charms from a different starting point. Her core aesthetic centers on reinventing classic diamond jewellery, and she treats the charm category as a deliberate departure from that discipline. "Charms are often where I can play and be a little more whimsical and experimental," she says. Her latest launch revisits her signature star charms alongside the elephant, lotus flower, and yin and yang — symbols that carry cultural weight across multiple traditions, pressed into gold and worn as a personal cosmology.

The visual language running through all of it is consistent: heavy chain links, engraved pendants, gemstone-set medallions, the satisfying weight of accumulated meaning on the wrist.

That accumulation is precisely what makes the secondary market so relevant to this conversation. Sebastian Kaufmann, co-founder and CEO of JWL, a digital marketplace for pre-owned fine jewels, makes the case that antique charms offer something no single maison's current catalogue can replicate. "Antique charms allow combinations unimaginable in a single maison's catalogue — Ancient Roman fragments alongside Victorian lockets and mid-century gold," he says. The result is a bracelet that functions as a private museum, with each piece sourced from a different century.

Kaufmann also pushes back against the assumption that fine jewellery charm collecting belongs to a narrow collector class. "Charms, even when sitting in the fine jewellery category, can be equally democratic and individual: over time, anyone can build a charms collection through savings and gifting, though no two collections will ever be the same." The logic is cumulative rather than aspirational — a Victorian locket acquired at auction, a new Zhang piece received as a gift, a Trau star charm purchased to mark a personal milestone. The bracelet becomes a timeline.

Woolton, whose surname alone appears in the roundup, frames the category's durability in psychological terms that feel particularly apt for early 2026. "It's never too late to start collecting charms, and they aren't subject to fashion," she says. In an era of anxiety-inducing headlines, she adds, it is easy to see why these "luck carriers" continue to hold such a robust grip on collectors' imaginations.

The word "luck carrier" is worth sitting with. It suggests that what collectors are assembling, whether from JWL's pre-owned inventory or Trau's latest launch, is not merely decorative but protective — a wearable argument against uncertainty. That the luxury market has chosen this particular moment to go deep on charms, medallions, and celestial motifs is less a trend than a diagnosis.