LOS ANGELES — Until two years ago, Mike Alt, a software engineer in
Boulder, Colo., avoided jewelry for the same reason many men prefer to
go unadorned: “Jewelry, especially on men, seemed flashy and gaudy,” he
said.
“I never wore anything — not even my wedding ring, which
cracked six months after we got married,” Mr. Alt said. “That was 25
years ago.”
Then Mr. Alt received two sentimental gifts from his
wife — a palladium pendant in the shape of a lotus leaf, followed by a
leather bracelet for his 50th birthday, both designed by Todd Reed, a
jeweler who also happened to be a neighbor — and found himself
reconsidering his view of men’s jewelry.
“Todd’s stuff captures
every aspect of nature,” Mr. Alt said. “He presents it in a way that
accentuates the material and not the person.”
Mr. Alt was so
impressed with Mr. Reed’s style — the designer is known for his
pioneering use of raw diamonds in industrial chic settings — that he
asked him to make an anniversary cuff for his wife. When he stopped by
Mr. Reed’s flagship store in Boulder, he found himself coveting a $1,500
leather bracelet.
“I put it on and fell in love with it,” he
said. “It has a thicker leather band, about three-quarters of an inch
wide. It has small diamonds set in it, just enough so you notice them at
certain angles. I didn’t want to take it off. I can’t explain why.”
Unlike
tattoos, piercings or fashionable clothing, jewelry still provokes
deeply ambivalent feelings among men. Images of a casino pit boss draped
in gold chains or a used car salesman flashing a ring still echo
throughout pop culture, even though trends have clearly moved beyond
such caricatures of masculine adornment.
“With the importance of
the Internet, street-style photographers, bloggers, Hollywood style and
the abundance of red-carpet reporting for men and women, we see men
wearing jewelry, and it’s part of our modern psyche,” said Ken Downing,
senior vice president and fashion director at the retailer Neiman
Marcus. “So it would make sense that a trend that is so visual and
visible in the industry would translate at retail.”
Translate it
has: Sales of men’s accessories grew 9 percent to $13.6 billion in the
12 months ending May 2014, capping a two-year period that saw the
category grow 13 percent over all, according to the market research
company NPD Group. The fashion industry is capitalizing on men’s
accessories with a frenzy of expansion. In July, the fashion publisher
WWD reported that the designer Michael Kors had appointed a new global
men’s wear president, charged with building a $1 billion men’s brand.
“Men,
in general, have become more image-conscious,” said Maia Adams,
co-founder of Adorn Insight, a market research firm in London focused on
the jewelry trade. “It’s okay for them to follow fashion, groom
themselves, look after their bodies, watch what they eat. Even the vogue
for tattooing and piercing has become so mainstream that it’s
unsurprising jewelry has become part of that self-expression box of
tricks.”
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The
appetite for jewelry among millennial males is one oft-cited reason for
the surge in interest in the men’s category. “It is well-noted that
millennials have grown up in a more ‘accepting’ society, where things
such as same-sex marriage and mixed-race relationships no longer turn
heads,” Ms. Adams wrote in an email, “so it makes sense that men’s
jewelry — once considered rather niche — is now increasingly
mainstream.”
Research bears this out. Earlier this year,
Noise/The Intelligence Group , a youth-focused marketing agency based in
New York, released a report that found that, in a survey of 14- to
34-year-olds, 34 percent of men were willing to pay for a luxury
accessory.
The agency’s chief marketing officer, Jamie Gutfreund,
said the need to stand out in a demographic as large as Generation Y
helped explain a penchant for rare and distinctive luxury items.
“Millennials as a generation — there’s two billion of them around the
world,” she said. “How will they differentiate themselves?”
There
is nothing inherently new about men donning jewels to stand out in a
crowd. From the gold chains that adorned ancient Sumerian rulers in
Mesopotamia to the elaborate diamond necklaces beloved by India’s
maharajas, jewelry was a man’s game from the very beginning — and the
more powerful the man, the more sumptuous his ensemble.
“Where it
probably splits, like everything else, is the French Revolution,” said
Beatrice Behlen, senior curator of fashion and decorative arts at the
Museum of London, whose recent “Tomfoolery” exhibit featured photographs
of male Londoners wearing jewelry.
After the rise of the
bourgeoisie at the end of the 18th century, Ms. Behlen said, came “The
Great Masculine Renunciation,” a phenomenon that saw men eschew bright
colors and ornamental styles in favor of darker, more utilitarian
clothing that underscored their commitment to work over beauty.
“Women
are the fragile dolls, and men wear the clothes you can wear to walk
around in the city,” Ms. Behlen said. “That doesn’t change again until
the Second World War. The next time men are legitimately allowed to wear
jewelry, apart from tie pins, is the hippie period — when it was fine
to show your feminine side.”
Yet for all the “free love” of the
1960s and ’70s, men who wore jewels still found themselves on the fringe
until the culture shifted again in the ’80s. “What is happening that is
different?” asked Judith Price, president of the National Jewelry
Institute in New York: “Sports and music.”
Ms. Price contends
that jewelry for men became socially acceptable again some 25 years ago,
when hip-hop stars and famous athletes began to sport heavy gold chains
and diamond-encrusted accessories. For a more contemporary style icon,
she referred to Prince Harry of Britain, whose taste for wearing stacks
of beaded and leather bracelets on his wrist is well documented.
“Everyone
wants to be Harry, they want to be a king, a royal,” Ms. Price said.
“So they are emulating what sports stars, hip-hop rappers and royals
wear.”
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To
hear Neiman Marcus’s Mr. Downing tell it, the 29-year-old Prince
Harry’s predilection for surfer-style bracelets reflects a truism about
men’s jewelry (today, at least): The wrist is a focal point, with the
trend reaching across age and income brackets. “A gentleman in a meeting
with a pinstriped suit — it’s not unusual to see beads and silver
poking out beneath his cuff,” Mr. Downing said.
To people
familiar with the market, it is difficult to say which came first: the
tide of interest in men’s baubles, or the retail selection to support
it.
“When I was a kid, a guy would not walk into a jeweler if not
to buy something for a woman,” said Lawrence McCormick, vice president
for marketing at William Henry, a maker of pocket knives and men’s
luxury accessories based in McMinnville, Ore. “Every time we walked into
a jeweler, we felt mostly uncomfortable. Everything around us — the
cases, the décor — was designed for a female audience.”
A few
years ago, Marie Helene Morrow, president of Grupo Reinhold, the parent
company behind a dozen upscale jewelry stores in Puerto Rico, decided to
change that. Last November, Ms. Morrow opened Kiyume — the word means
male in Swahili — a 650-square-foot men’s boutique in Plaza Las
Américas, Puerto Rico’s biggest luxury mall. The store caters to men
with an assortment of jewels and personal style tokens — from cufflinks
and watches to grilling tools hand-carved from elk antlers.
“I
felt so sorry for the men,” Ms. Morrow said. “They’d come to Reinhold —
we finally got a little seating area. Most of the time, they’d just read
the paper. I felt men were really shortchanged. But I didn’t want to
get into men’s suits and shirts. I wanted accessories. I wanted it to be
a clubhouse, where men could play cards or dominoes.”
Thanks to
the collective push behind men’s jewelry, Ms. Morrow and other retailers
now have a wider selection of designers to work with. This fall, for
example, Alex Soldier, a Russian master jeweler based in New York, is
debuting his first fine jewelry collection for men. It includes Zodiac
pendants fashioned from smoky quartz, textured gold cufflinks in the
shape of snails, and a $25,000 one-of-a-kind signet ring in 18-karat
white, yellow and rose gold, with a 1.27-carat cushion-cut diamond
framed by 2.45 carats of rhodolite garnets.
Even jewelry
newcomers have felt the inexorable pull to the men’s side. Todd Vladyka
and Jim Hinz, the duo behind Editions De Re, a one-year-old line of
men’s accessories based in Philadelphia, quit their careers in the
medical and art book fields, respectively, to pursue their fascination
with jewelry.
“We spent Friday nights getting pizza, drinking
beer and sitting around drawing stuff,” Mr. Vladyka said.
“Independently, we both took jewelry-making classes because we both love
metal. We talked about it and talked about it and we said if we don’t
do something about it, it’s going to make us crazy.”
Committed to
making “jewelry for the guys who don’t wear jewelry,” as Mr. Vladyka
said, they created a set of trapezoid-shaped cufflinks at the behest of
their friend Kate Egan, co-owner of Egan Day, a local jewelry boutique.
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“They
showed up with 12 drawings and they were really good,” Ms. Egan said.
“Straight, gay, every guy who comes into my store wants an Editions De
Re belt buckle,” she said. “Men want special things as much as women do —
that’s what I’ve noticed.”
At William Henry, the founder and
chief designer, Matt Conable, introduced in July his first jewelry
collection, a tribute to HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” He rendered the
series’ mythical universe in offbeat materials, such as fossilized
mammoth ivory and Damascus steel.
“It’s the largest product investment we’ve ever made,” Mr. McCormick said of the 65-piece collection.
Mr.
Reed, the designer from Colorado, is equally committed to the men’s
category. In June, at the Couture show in Las Vegas, he unveiled his
first full-blown men’s jewelry collection, including belt buckles,
stitched leather bracelets and a black jade ring with black diamonds
that he described as “the sexiest thing” he has ever made.
“We
have an advertising budget for men, we have P.R.,” Mr. Reed said. “We
were always making men’s, but it was always one-offs. It never got the
energy from a business perspective.”
The strength of the men’s
business was one of the chief reasons Mr. Reed chose Los Angeles for the
location of his second flagship store, which opened this month on
hipper-than-thou Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach. “For me, L.A.
has always been a very men-centric city,” he said. “I wanted to focus on
the celebrity sphere, custom work and the men’s side — and they all
co-mingle.”
Even stalwarts of the women’s jewelry design scene
are edging their way into the men’s arena. After years of hemming and
hawing, the jeweler Solange Azagury-Partridge, based in London,
introduced Alpha, her first men’s collection, in June. Priced from about
2,000-10,000 pounds, or $3,200 to $16,500, the line reflects the
designer’s cheeky sensibility. It includes a “Ball and Chain” pendant in
sterling silver and a “Caveman” ring in blackened yellow gold that
resembles a miniaturized skull and teeth.
For all the hoopla over
men’s jewelry, however, it seems that the Great Masculine Renunciation —
when society deemed that a real man could no longer be bejeweled — has
cast a long shadow across the ages.
“I don’t like a guy who is
too adorned,” Ms. Azagury-Partridge confessed. “My criteria is, Would
this guy still be attractive to me if he was wearing this jewelry, or
would he make me feel ill?”
