5 Stunning Ways To Incorporate Vintage Jewelry Into Your Wedding Look

Vintage jewelry is one of the best ways to make your wedding outfit memorable, personal, and unique. But how should you use antique jewelry? While it's easy to say that you should use it any way you want, here are a few much more concrete ideas to match your own wedding vibe.

1. Bedazzle the Bouquet

Jewelry and flower blooms are a classic combination. Why not use them both in your bouquet?

Some brides opt to skip flowers entirely and instead wire brooches, necklaces, rings, and other jewelry elements into a ball shape for their bouquet. Commonly known as a brooch bouquet, this is a lasting memento of your wedding day. But you can also use flowers as the main bouquet component. Just strategically fill in spaces with jewelry, add gems to the handle and ribbon, or weave in pendants and drape pearls.

2. Make Hair Ornaments

Nearly any piece of jewelry can be repurposed into a hair ornament. Connect something you love to a headband with wire, designing a DIY tiara. Turn a brooch into a hair clip. Fasten your veil with a brooch, ring, or even separated earrings. Weave a necklace into your updo. Or, remove colored or diamond gems from a vintage piece and pin them onto a hat or headwear.

Again, this is a great place to combine flowers and gems. It could be a flower and gem tiara or headband. Or mix and match flowers and complementary stones into the right spots for a surprising look.

3. Jazz Up a Belt

Belts help add flair and individuality to any wedding dress—and especially to simpler or less expensive designs. You could buy a ready-made belt, but making your own adds a beautiful touch of sentiment and personality. It may also be more fun and less expensive than a commercial one.

Start with something as basic as a length of ribbon, or choose a simple belt with a structure you like. Then, embellish its front and sides as much as you like. As with brooch bouquets, you get to explore your artistic side. Make it as large and eye-catching as you want, or keep it simple with just one or two outstanding jeweled elements.

4. Make It Your Something Old

Many brides follow the traditional good luck charm of adding something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue to their wedding look. Vintage pieces can be your something old or something blue—or even both!

Wear jewelry in the form it was designed, incorporate pieces into your bouquet or dress, add them to your shoes, or sew them in as a hidden detail only you will see. You can also pass things on so they're the next bride's something borrowed. It's a fun tradition and a cost-effective way to do it.

5. Create a Boutonniere

Grooms who want to get in on the wedding jewelry trend have their own choices too. Style jewelry into cufflinks, bracelets, necklaces, or other stunning pieces. Or match your partner with a jewelry boutonniere. Mix and match a combination of buttons, wire, and small gems or jewelry into a shaped bundle that slips into the pocket and peeks out. It's unique and fun, and it can be any style or color you want.

How might your wedding look be enhanced by vintage jewelry? Find out by touring the inventory at 2 J's Pawn & Gun. We get new pieces in all the time, offering wedding couples a range of styles, sizes, colors, eras, and price ranges to choose from. Visit or shop online today to find the unique jewels that speak to you and take your wedding day look from ordinary to extraordinary.