The jewels are the new ties

The French essayist and critic Roland Barthes wrote that «for a long time, jewelry has drawn from its mineral origin this symbolic power: to denote an inflexible order of things.» Although relegated to the feminine sphere due to archetypes that literature and society have decided to almost exclusively associate with that side, in reality, jewelry has long been a sign of ultimate power, «that is, of virility» - an idea that only needed to be seen to manifest its potency. The tradition of jewelry begins to change when its production process also undergoes a transformation: the shift from stones and metals to fragile materials turns it into a democratic object, less prone to prejudices, a «infinitely usable, no longer subject to the law of high prices or that of particular, festive, almost sacralized use.»

The history of men's jewelry, though difficult to reconstruct, seems to be experiencing a second creative season that found in the pandemic the perfect pretext to build an effective teaser on multiple fronts. «While men's jewelry has been a well-established category for a long time,» as stated in WWD, «it is still considered a market not fully exploited by retailers, who are expanding their assortments to offer the individual style desired by customers.» This is confirmed by Lyst, which reports a 43% year-over-year increase in searches for men's jewelry and data from ShopStyle, which records a 28.6% growth in 2022. «It's still an unexplored market,» declared Luke Raymond, senior menswear editor at Farfetch, to WWD. «It starts from the top, as in the case of the necklace with 42 engagement rings, Previous Engagements, worn by Drake and arrives in TikTok's get ready with me.» If actors and singers like Timothée Chalamet, Harry Styles, or Machine Gun Kelly have contributed to the construction of an aesthetic imaginary based on the celebration of jewelry, social media has acted as an amplifier. With gender boundaries blurred and the evocative power of jewelry reduced - a different story for luxury watches and houses with an almost unshakable heritage like Cartier or Bulgari - what sets them apart is the format, as well as the reference community.

 Genderless Brands

«Jewelry is no longer tied to a gender,» explained Rachel Akmakijian, director of relationships with jewelers at BriteCo, a jewelry insurance company, to WWD. «The idea of men's jewelry versus women's jewelry, I believe, will be destined to disappear.» Indeed, in November 2020, Julia Lang, founder & creative director of the jewelry brand Veert, chose to promote the launch campaign with an all-male cast. Shortly after, her heart-shaped earrings and pearl necklaces ended up on Brad Pitt, Timothee Chalamet, The Weeknd, Steph Curry, and Miguel, who was already featured in the first campaign. Five years earlier, in 2015, a project emerged aimed at overturning the rules of men's jewelry: Alan Crocetti. «When I started, I only photographed men, and people would say, why don't you use women? You'll sell more! And I thought yes, but aren't you tired of seeing only women wearing jewelry?» recounted the founder and creative director of the brand to GQ Italy. Brutally deformed ear cuffs, XXL rings, flaming necklaces, or a plaster to be applied on the nose served on photo dumps that exalt sculpted male physiques - «the nose plaster was like a symbol showing that we are trying to move away from this toxic masculinity, that we are trying to "fix ourselves." It's like putting on a plaster waiting to heal,» continued the Brazilian designer based in London. The same visual-narrative format, albeit modified in its aesthetic elements, has been embraced by an Italian new wave that has made jewelry a field for reinterpreting contemporaneity. Luca Cantarelli, starting in 2020, began intertwining silver with streetwear and sportswear codes, presenting bracelets, necklaces, and signet rings with titles like Coach Pendant, 2ND Round Ring, or Iron Player Bracelet, becoming the intersection between art, clubbing, and queer culture. In the same period, the brand of Luigi Giaretti, Lag World, emerged; long before creating its community on Instagram and TikTok, Giaretti worked in the fashion world within showrooms and commercial departments, developing strategic skills that he then translated into an aesthetic imaginary of pointed earrings and ear cuffs. His creations, ranging from manga culture to the music scene of the '90s and early 2000s, have been worn by Kylie Jenner, Michele Bravi, Giuseppe Gioffré, and Mattia Stanga. A user base that, in part, has also absorbed the brand of Gabriele Esposito, Zero Three Seventeen, in the form of deliberately imperfect geometric earrings and necklaces now in Mediterranean colors, now with pointed crosses.

The Community

For genderless brands, the format is mainly connected to the body and its intimate and erotic dimension - not always the desire to refer to the mental encyclopedia of the queer community implies adherence to the values of inclusivity in a broad sense - combined with a well-defined celebrity culture. It is different in the case of brands entirely focused on engaging their community. In 2019, two friends from Barcelona, Biel Juste and Joan Margrit, decide to document their journey to Coachella until they face the challenge of finding the perfect jewelry for their street style looks. Back in Barcelona, they search on Google for "jewelers" and, after various rejections, find a local manufacturer willing to give them a chance: amidst sketches of moons, suns, and the eye of Horus, widely used in Ibiza's iconography, the Twojeys brand is born. To market the first 200 pieces, following a teaser featuring wild horses, quotes from Fight Club, cowboys, and scenes from The Fast and The Furious, they uploaded a video introducing themselves in a Ford Mustang on Margrit's family ranch. Amidst the various lockdowns of 2020, their community grew significantly, from 30,000 to 360,000 followers. Their reasonably priced jewelry, accompanied by a feed built around vintage sports cars, DJ sets, and helicopter flights, reached a turnover of €4.5 million in 2022. Merging the languages of e-commerce and social media, Biel Juste and Joan Margarit built a brand that has already attracted the attention of celebrities like Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, or Jared Leto - «It's like a channel: instead of Netflix, you can see what they're doing; every day they have something new,» confessed to BoF Bastien Daguzan, CEO of Jacquemus. The format, mostly based on a daily entertainment model aiming to replicate the Jacquemus-Provence narrative on the jewelry-Ibiza asset, has already conquered the Spanish Gen-Z: in Madrid, in the artistic district of Malasaña, Twojeys pieces are now everywhere. «It's like the New York Yankees' hat,» says Marius Seiryu Yo, a student in the city, to BoF. It is indeed the case to say that along the road and on the feeds, jewelry is taking the place of ties.