Glitz, glamour and fake glasses: Why Claire's Accessories means so much to my generation

Jane Cowan: "You may think that Claire’s Accessories was a phase I went through as a child and have since gotten over. You would be wrong." Picture: John Keeble/Getty Images.

People like to talk about magpies being attracted to shiny things. For most of my life, I have shared a similar affliction, an attraction to all things glitz. 

I grew up with two older sisters, so everything that I loved about dressing up, makeup and jewellery was taught from an early age. 

As the youngest, I was the designated face for practising blue eyeliner and glittery lipgloss on. 

Because in the days before makeup tutorials for eight-year-olds, we had to work those things out for ourselves, through trial and plenty of error. It was always great fun.

During this time, my Mecca was the Claire’s Accessories shop in our nearest shopping centre. I thought it was the epitome of glamour. 

There was something about the floor-to-ceiling friendship bracelets, earrings, tiaras, stripey tights and fake glasses that just scratched a very specific itch in my brain. 

I couldn’t walk past the place without begging my parents to let me have a browse. I remember staring at the walls of hairbands and finding it impossible to pick out just one. 

The selection of scented lip balms and bedazzled key rings beside the till taught me the joy of the impulse purchase. 

I did not have a key to attach my sparkling purple butterfly keyring to at the age of six. But that didn’t stop me from attaching it to my schoolbag and listening to it jingle the whole walk to school. I thought I had to be Britney Spears.

Jane Cowan, circa 2012 (author's self-impression). Pic: iStock

My clearest memory of Claire’s Accessories took place on January 8, 2012. It was my eighth birthday. 

And after months of bargaining with my parents, I was allowed to get my ears pierced. I thought it was a coming of age. 

What ensued was me being given a teddy bear to squeeze while they rammed needles through my earlobes in the corner of the shop. 

But as I was handed a mirror and got to admire my new pink flower earrings, through the streams of tears running down my cheeks, I soon understood what was meant by the phrase ‘beauty is pain’. 

My tiny ears throbbed and swelled up, and I never felt cooler. I can still smell the disinfectant lotion being applied to my ears. It smelled like an artificial strawberry sweet, which only added to the sophistication of the whole situation, in my eyes. 

Crying through the trauma of a Claire’s ear piercing was a formative experience shared by so many girls my age. 

You figure out why your mother had been trying to delay the ear piercing. Then you cry a second time when the piercer tells you that you can’t change the earrings for eight weeks, as if they don’t know you have eight years of going earring-free to catch up on. 

I applied that disinfectant lotion every day for weeks, counting down the days until I could return to the holy land and purchase my second pair of earrings. Some dangly silver dolphins it was, obviously. I’m still chasing that high.

You may think that Claire’s Accessories was a phase I went through as a child and have since gotten over. You would be wrong. 

Jane Cowan in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin. Photograph Moya Nolan

Even now, on Halloween, I have been known to rely on Claire’s for my last-minute costume accessories. A wand, a tiara, a set of wings? Throw that on with some sort of frilly dress and a glossy lip – you’re a fairy princess, or me on the 31st of October last year. 

The wings may have been aged 4-5, but they did the job for a few hours. I even ran into a girl wearing the same set of wings in the queue for the nightclub toilet. 

We laughed about never wanting to let go of Claire’s for the childhood nostalgia attached to it. Because nowhere else makes tacky earrings and bracelets feel so cool. 

It was a shop so perfectly designed for kids. We didn’t want understated elegance in our jewellery. 

We wanted colourful friendship bracelets with our initials on them. We wanted flower crowns to wear on the playground. We wanted to wear pink stripey tights under our school pinafores. Claire’s gave us that and more.

I have been half-lamenting Claire’s Accessories since hearing that the company filed for bankruptcy in the US and collapsed into administration in the UK and Ireland. B

ecause it brought a lot of joy to a lot of children. I hope that legacy can continue on. I am and always have a bit of a magpie when it comes to shiny stuff. And I owe that to Claire’s Accessories. 

Claire’s dolphin earrings walked so my big girl jewellery could run.