Clothes don’t maketh man. Necklaces do. Or so you might think, to judge by the cover of a British Sunday supplement late last year. This showed the cookery writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall wearing nothing but jewellery. His bottom half hidden in a river as he wrestled with a salmon, his top half naked save for a pendant—a sort of metal arrow head on a thong—that somehow conveyed a singular message: I hunt, I catch, I feed. And I do quite a bit of telly.
It’s a business that’s worth a lot. According to the market researchers Euromonitor, in 2005 British men bought £136m-worth of luxury jewellery; by 2010, despite the recession, this had gone up to £168m. The greatest increase was not in safely conservative watches, either, but bracelets and—yes, Hugh—necklaces. Laura McCreddie, the editor of Retail Jewellery magazine, claims that this is one of the most noticeable trends of the past few years; it has now reached a point where “star designers like Tomasz Donocik start out making men’s jewellery, and only afterwards move into women’s—rather than the other way round, as always used to be the case.”
But who, exactly, is wearing it? Male hero-figures have experimented with jewellery for years. The England cricketer Derek Pringle wore an earring as long ago as 1982; cue much huffing and puffing at Lord’s from cricket-loving readers of the Daily Telegraph—who must have been even more astonished when Pringle turned up, many years later, as their cricket correspondent. The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards wears a skull ring that features so prominently on the cover of his autobiography it almost replaces his eye. The book has sold a million copies, which means that picture is lying around in a million homes, subtly altering the atmosphere the way Keith’s music once did. There are few more macho figures than the actor Gerard Butler—he of “300”, every teenage boy’s favourite action movie—yet he has been photographed wearing multiple man-bangles. And the dominance of hip-hop has put the jewel-encrusted male at the top of the pop ladder for the past two decades. A man in his 20s can’t remember a time when male bling wasn’t part of the landscape.
And yet…Using Twitter, I put out a call to men who wear jewellery to tell me what they wear, and why. My tweet was retweeted to several thousand people; only a handful got back to me. I wouldn’t want to generalise about those who took the trouble to answer, but note that several identified themselves as science-fiction enthusiasts, one as a “plain-clothes punk philosopher” and another as a practitioner of reiki. Not absolutely mainstream types, then. And although I was told about a rising Conservative MP who wears a friendship bracelet under his cuff, perhaps the telling thing is not that he wears it, but where: out of sight.
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