“Cape Cod bracelets are all over my TikTok For Your Page,” Halie LeSavage, Marie Claire’s senior fashion and beauty news editor, told me in a recent team meeting. It was a sentence I never could have imagined hearing—especially in our midtown Manhattan office, set to a chorus of honking taxi cabs—and 250 miles from the Massachusetts peninsula where I grew up.
I received my first Cape Cod bracelet—a thin silver band held together by a gold screwball clasp—when I was three. It was a gift from my grandmother, who raised my mother on the Cape and lived there year-round. The bracelet remained on my wrist for the entirety of my sun-soaked childhood. When I inevitably outgrew it, my mom repurposed the tiny child-size bracelet into a keyring she still uses today.
