WASHINGTON — Madeleine Albright, who died at 84 on March 23, will be remembered for all of the glass ceilings she shattered as a woman. She went from a refugee fleeing from Nazi and Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe with her family to the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.
She has cemented herself in history for all of her achievements in government, education and so much more, but we would be remiss if we did not talk about a particular fashion statement she made, more specifically the pins.
Insects, flowers, balloons, snakes, bees, ribbons, a lot of red, white and blue — Albright explained in an interview with Smithsonian in June 2010 that her hundreds of brooches reflected her foreign policy.
Albright said in the interview her pin collection started when she was serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. At the time, a poem in a Baghdad newspaper called Albright "an unparalleled serpent" for her criticism of Saddam Hussein.
In response, Albright decided to wear a snake pin she happened to own when addressing a group of reporters ahead of a meeting with Iraqui officials.
Recognizing the impact of the messages sent with a simple pin, Albright started collecting brooches and pins that could make diplomatic statements.
Some pins reflected her mood — she would wear flowers on happy days and insects on bad days. Others could send a more powerful foreign policy message.
The message would be received by America's allies and adversaries.
According to the National Museum of American Diplomacy (NMAD), Vladimir Putin once told then-President Bill Clinton that Russian diplomats would "routinely" check to see what brooch Albright was wearing.
On the first day of nuclear arms discussions while she was serving in the state department, NMAD says that Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov looked at Albright's arrow-like pin and asked her, “Is that one of your interceptor missiles?”
“Yes, and as you can see, we know how to make them very small. So you’d better be ready to negotiate,” she responded, according to NMAD.
In June 2017, during a visit to Kyiv, Albright tweeted a photo of a pin she was wearing to show her support for Ukrainian democracy.
She started sharing her many brooches in a traveling exhibit between 2009 to 2018 called "Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection."
She then donated a collection of 200 pins from her years in public service to the NMAD. The museum, located in the Harry S. Truman Building in Northwest D.C., currently has the pins on loan and is displaying the "Read My Pins" exhibit virtually.
The exhibit will officially be on display once the full museum opens in 2024. In the meantime, it is available to look at virtually on NMAD's website.
NMAD is currently small, but it will soon be a larger national museum, built from a private-public partnership between the State Department and the Diplomacy Center Foundation. The museum paid tribute to Albright on Facebook after her death.
"Secretary Albright helped found our museum and remained one of our strongest supporters for the rest of her life," a Facebook message says. "We’re proud to be the home of her famous collection of pins that she used throughout her diplomatic career to convey messages. Her contribution to American diplomacy will endure and her legacy remembered."
Albright expressed excitement for the museum on Twitter in recent years. After Leslie Jones pointed out a pin Albright wore during an interview on MSNBC in November 2020, tweeting, "I want a walking man on my jacket[,]" Albright responded to the comedian it was a pin of former President Harry Truman.
She later sent the comedian a signed copy of her "Read My Pins" book, which Jones tweeted with excitement.