“Those are a dated style of jewelry. No one wants those anymore and no one is wearing them anymore.” - A Dealer Once Said to Me
Well, I beg to differ. When I started my vintage and antique jewelry obsession, I stumbled upon these interesting, bedazzled brooches that were worn nestled in the corners of dress necklines of old Hollywood actresses in the 1930s and 1940s. These pieces were the epitome of vintage glamour in my eyes. And everywhere I hunted fine jewelry, not a one was to be found. I was able to find costume jewelry styles but never anything in solid gold or platinum and diamonds. So, for me, getting my hot paws on a set of double clip brooches to call my own was a journey that I found highly enjoyable if not time consuming.
Once I finally found a pair for myself and began wearing them, dozens of collectors came out of the woodwork asking to buy my pair, which of course was not for sale. I had double, triple, quadruple offers against what I paid for mine on the table. But all were politely turned down with a sweet smile and a promise to locate a pair for them when I sourced more.
So, yes, these are dated. In the best possible way. And, as for no one wanting or wearing them anymore, I think not. Read on for a bit more about these sumptuous little treasures.
What it is
A duette or double-clip brooch is two clips. That's it. But not really and the devil is, as always, in the details.
Each half is a fully finished piece of jewelry — its own pin mechanism, its own design logic, its own ability to stand alone on a lapel or a hat brim. Slide both halves into a single frame with a mechanism on the back, and you get one symmetrical or asymmetrical brooch. Pull them apart and you have a matched pair of dress clips. This is not a gimmick bolted onto a brooch after the fact. It was engineered from the start to do both jobs.
Worth knowing before you pull a pair apart: not all clips are identical twins. Some sets are mirror-image, a true left and a right, designed to face each other or angle outward symmetrically when the brooch is assembled — take them off the frame and they still visibly belong to opposite sides of a pair. Others are made identically, both clips pointing the same direction with no mirroring at all, so the two halves are fully interchangeable off the frame. Both are correct, original construction — it's not a sign of a mismatched or married set, just a difference in how the designer built the pair. Worth checking which kind you have before you decide how to wear the halves separately, since a true left-and-right pair reads differently pinned on than two identical clips do.
"Duette" is technically a trademarked term — Coty Inc. licensed the mechanism from a patent filed by the Coro company (specifically designer/engineer Maurice Duvalet's work refined through the 1930s), and Coro registered "Duette" for their line in 1931. Other manufacturers made the same two-in-one construction under other names: Trifari made them, Mazer made them, Boucher made them. So the correct umbrella term, if you want to be accurate instead of just recognizable, is "double clip brooch." Duette is Coro's brand name for it, the way "Kleenex" is a brand name for facial tissue. We'll use both, but we know the difference, and now so do you.
One correction while we're being precise: people frequently mistake these for shoe buckles. They aren’t and never were. Shoe buckles are a real and much older category of their own, made to fasten or ornament footwear and shaped accordingly — flatter, and built to sit against a shoe rather than grip fabric. A duette has a spring-loaded clip mechanism on the back, built to hold onto a lapel or a neckline, not a shoe. The confusion is understandable at a glance — some duette silhouettes are rectangular or geometric in a way that echoes buckle shapes — but the mechanism gives it away immediately if you turn it over. This one has never been anywhere near a shoe.
A few double clip brooches convert to other pieces of jewelry besides just two clip brooches. For example, the pair above converts from one single brooch to a pair of earrings. This is an out of the ordinary conversion, even for a brooch style that is already “dated.” And another double clip brooch also converts into a third style – a jabot pin. A small mechanism was built into the back to allow this functionality. How charming and fun!
And some double clip brooches never came with a frame, as is evidenced by the bird pair above.
Who wore them, and why
The mechanism itself traces back to Cartier. The spring-loaded clip system that makes a double clip brooch possible was developed and patented at Cartier in the late 1920s — commonly dated to 1927, with Cartier's own archives placing the double-prong version as early as 1928. Cartier built it into a signature product through the early-to-mid 1930s: a convertible piece, sold as fine jewelry in platinum and diamonds, that could be worn as one large brooch or split into two clips. Everyone else came after. Coro's trademarked "Duette," Trifari's Clip-Mate, Mazer's and Boucher's own versions — all of it is the costume-jewelry democratization of a mechanism Cartier invented first, for a much smaller and much wealthier clientele.
The double clip brooch belongs to the 1930s and 1940s — Depression-era through wartime. That context matters more than usual here, because it explains the design logic.
Women's daywear in this period ran conservative and repetitive by necessity: fabric was rationed, silhouettes were tailored and unfussy, and a woman was likely to own fewer dresses and suits than she had occasions to wear them to. A double clip brooch solved a real problem. Worn together as one large brooch, it anchored a lapel or a neckline or worn on a fur coat or stole for an evening out. Split apart, one clip went on the lapel and the other went on a hat or even a glove cuff — instantly, the same dress or outerwear read as a different outfit. A brooch-to-earrings or brooch-to-jabot-pin piece like the ones above solved a slightly different version of the same problem: one purchase, reconfigured across three completely different wearing occasions.
This is also precisely why the clip mechanism itself — not a pin stem, but a spring-loaded clip, often patented and stamped, sometimes with a fur-clip variant with longer prongs for heavier fabric — was such a functional innovation. It had to hold on wool suiting and silk alike without a visible pinhole.
Manufacturers who mattered here: Coro (Duette), Trifari (the "Clip-Mate" mechanism), Mazer Bros., Boucher, and European houses working in platinum and diamonds for clients who wanted the same functional idea executed in fine jewelry rather than costume metal. The construction shows up across the full price spectrum of the era — from pot metal and rhinestone to platinum and old European cut diamonds — which is part of what makes the category interesting to collect. The idea was democratic even when the materials weren't.
Why it still gets people today
Nobody makes these anymore. Not "nobody makes them like this anymore" — nobody makes the actual mechanism. The convertible frame with parts that separate into independently wearable pieces is not a current manufacturing category. The rationing-driven, do-double-duty logic that justified the engineering cost doesn't exist in a world of fast fashion and unlimited daywear options. So, every piece like this in circulation today is old (vintage, to be exact, almost antique). There is no reproduction market undercutting it, because there is no modern equivalent being made.
That makes it a closed category. What exists is what exists. And most people handling one at an estate sale or in a drawer have no idea it comes apart — they see one brooch, not a brooch, a pair of earrings, and a jabot pin all waiting inside it, and that gap in knowledge is exactly the kind of thing that makes a piece interesting to the people who do know. It's not rare in the sense of a handful of surviving examples in general. The brooch to earrings specific construction is rarer still — rare enough that it's the first one we've personally seen.
Survivorship adds another layer. The connecting frame is a separate, smaller piece of metal that had to be kept track of alongside its parts over ninety-some years, and frequently it wasn't — frames get lost, and what turns up today is often a single component on its own, with no match and no frame in sight. Finding a complete set, frame and all matching parts, is genuinely harder than finding just one half. That's not a flaw in a piece offered incomplete — it's the ordinary condition of the category after this much time, and it's part of what makes a complete, matched set worth paying attention to when one does surface.
How to wear one now
The frame — the part that holds the piece together as a brooch — is the least interesting part of this for modern styling. The fact that it breaks down into separate, genuinely different pieces of jewelry is where the versatility lives:
As a two-person piece. For a best friend or a mother-daughter pair, splitting these so that one person each gets a piece is a vintage take on a more modern concept (the “best friends” split heart pendant necklace). The ultimate piece shared across two collectors who wear and love a piece of vintage jewelry that isn’t made anymore.
As one piece, worn multiple ways. You don't need a second person at all to get value here. Wear it as the brooch for one occasion, break it down to the earrings for the next, or reach for a jabot pin — through a blouse tie, a scarf knot, or a lapel where a small vertical accent reads better than a round one. It's one purchase covering completely different looks, which — like the rationing-era logic it was built on — is just more mileage out of one piece.
Reassembled, worn as intended. Put it back together as the brooch on a coat lapel or a plain neckline. This is the version closest to what the original owner would have worn.
The era does the styling work for you — 1930s and 40s design reads as tailored and graphic rather than fussy, so it sits well on the kind of minimal, structured pieces already in most closets. It doesn't need to be treated as a costume-y throwback. Worn as the earrings alone, or as the jabot pin alone, most people won't clock the decade, or the fact that they used to be one brooch, at all. They'll just notice it's good.
0 comments